-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Drive to any Indian city. Chances are you will wade into chaotic traffic and roads full of potholes. You'll see choked drains, overflowing and smelly bins and streetlights that don't work. The reason for the mess isn't difficult to unravel. Most of our municipal bodies are cash strapped, unable to take care of the city's needs. The workforce is poor. Given the indifferent reputation of urban...

-The Times of India   NEW DELHI: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen on Sunday backed Bihar's growth strategy, arguing that growth was not independent of social transformation. "What is needed is an integrated approach for Development and growth," Sen said at a book release event. Citing Japan's model, which was later adopted by South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, the noted economist suggested that without education and proper health facilities, it was difficult...

Adding to the debate over celebrity economists blaming India’s malnutrition and stunting vis-à-vis Sub Saharan Africa on genetic differences, Dean Spears, a public health expert and a visiting fellow at Delhi School of Economics, offers evidence connecting our poor sanitation and open defecation with high morbidity and malnutrition. (see both links below). In an evidence-based paper titled Policy Lessons from Implementing India’s Total Sanitation Campaign (2012), based on the review...

-Economic and Political Weekly The mid-day meal programme was introduced to mitigate social inequalities inherited through the hierarchical division of society, or what is called "resilience of social structures". This structural discrimination directly impedes equal access to benefits of Development by excluding the poor and marginalised. A study of the MDM programme in rural Rajasthan probes this aspect of the "resilience of social structure". In particular, the article asks under what...

-The Telegraph Sonia Gandhi has questioned the laxity in monitoring midday-meal quality in the wake of the deaths of over 20 children in a Bihar school. The UPA chairperson called Union human resource Development (HRD) minister M.M. Pallam Raju yesterday and expressed strong displeasure over the monitoring of the programme on which the Centre spends around Rs 10,000 crore a year, a source said. She said she was saddened by the death of...