Women today are spending longer in labour than half a century back. After comparing data on nearly 1.4 lakh deliveries between 1960 and 2000, scientists have found that the first stage of labour had increased by 2.6 hours for first-time mothers.  For women who had previously given birth, this early stage of labour took two hours longer in recent years than for women in the 1960s. Infants born in the contemporary...

-The Wall Street Journal These days, Indian policymakers are debating how to create a vast new food entitlement program. There is talk of poor households struggling to cope with high food prices and malnourishment among their children. What you don’t hear much about, however, is the most tragic and outrageous consequence of India’s failure to feed its people adequately: starvation deaths. India is a nation that prides itself on having been self-sufficient in...

To get the Below Poverty Line figures in perspective, we need to closely monitor the numbers driving the Corporate Plunder Line. One Tendulkar makes the big scores. The other wrecks the averages. The Planning Commission clearly prefers Suresh to Sachin. Using Professor Tendulkar's methodology, it declares that there's been another massive fall in poverty. Yes, another (“more dramatic in the rural areas”). “Record Fall in Poverty” reads one headline. The record...

India’s decision-makers seem to find it difficult to see that there are children in the country. Being unable to see them, they are unable to perceive that they are hungry. In an age when we are able to use euphemisms like ‘under-nutrition’, this is perhaps not surprising. But it is disgraceful none the less.   This country has a large population of children. Fortyone per cent of its total numbers. The national...

National Sample Survey Organisation's report on the average calorie intake per person in Indian households points to a much higher incidence of poverty in the country than reflected in estimates of the proportion of the population below the official "poverty" line. Among the features that sully India’s “growth story” is the persistence and possible worsening of malnutrition in the country. The subsistence nutritional intake adopted when defining the official poverty line...