-IPS News ROME: Jassiben, a self-employed potter from Nana Shahpur village in western India, loves summer despite the heat waves and frequent power cuts, because summer days always mean great business. "Poor people like us do not have refrigerators, so they store drinking water in the earthen pots that keep the water cool," says Jassiben, who uses only one name. "This year, the demand has been so high, I am selling at least...

-IPS News ROME: The growing consensus, momentum and commitment to eradicate world hunger may seem overly ambitious in view of the slow progress in reducing the number of hungry people in the world in recent decades. After all, declining food prices in the second half of the 20th century, thanks to increasing production, were not enough to eliminate poverty and hunger in the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, many governments invested a...

-The Hindustan Times The audacious ambush and bloody massacre of more than two dozen political leaders and their security guards in Darbha valley of Sukma district in south Chhattisgarh, raises again profoundly important questions about the legitimacy of violence as an instrument to battle injustice and oppression. Resistance to injustice is widely endorsed as the highest human duty in most cultures, but the debate is about the legitimacy of deploying violence in...

-The Telegraph Ranchi: Among 85,000 children between 6 and 14 with disabilities, about 70,000 have been enrolled in schools, says a report of Jharkhand Education Project Council (JEPC) that finds a mention in Unicef's Global Report on the State of World's Children-2013. The report, which was released at Suchana Bhawan today by the UNICEF in the presence of state authorities, also mentioned that the prevalence of disability was 1.7 per cent -...

-Economic and Political Weekly     The puzzle of persistent undernutrition in India is largely explained by open defecation, population density, and lack of sanitation and hygiene. The impact on nutrition of many faecally-transmitted infections, not just the diarrhoeas, has been a blind spot. In hygienic conditions much of the undernutrition in India would disappear. Robert Chambers (r.chambers@ids.ac.uk) is with the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK and Gregor von Medeazza (gvonmedeazza@unicef.org)...