-The Telegraph New Delhi: The prevalence of low body weight, stunting and wasting is "significantly higher" among children from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, according to a government survey that nutrition experts say underscores challenges that demand solutions beyond just the availability of more food. The survey, carried out this year, has documented 39 per cent stunting (impaired growth with possible long-term impacts) among boys below five years from Dalit households...

-Scroll.in A scheme to give India’s poor people free power connections has been in operation since 2005. But the capacity to provide 24x7 power is still a dream. On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the “Pradhan Mantri Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana” or the Saubhagya scheme to provide electricity connections to Indians who do not have them. “The government will connect each house, whether it is in village, a city or...

-TheWire.in Diane Coffey and Dean Spears’ Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development and the Costs of Caste is a path breaking addition to the literature on child malnutrition and development policy in India. The history of global health has been marked with a dramatic turnaround starting from around the mid to late 19th century. This period witnessed an unprecedented decline in death rate and a steady increase in the life expectancy...

-The Indian Express In zones of prosperity, agriculture faces crisis, jobs are few, social aspirations don’t match economic realities After Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, farmers from Rajasthan came out on the streets demanding loan waiver and implementation of the Swaminathan Committee report. Protesting against government policies and demanding their share in the country’s development, which they argue have been denied to them, the farmers have shown unity across Caste and class lines....

-Firstpost.com Have women living in rural India benefitted from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Scheme (MGNREGA)? MNREGA was introduced in 2006 and has emerged as the largest programme in the world for providing employment to the rural poor. While there is no doubt that MNREGA in a short span of ten years did help generate 20 billion person-days of employment benefitting 276 million workers from which more than half were women....