The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme has been conceived as a major intervention by the Central government to deal with the high rates of infant mortality, low birth weight, and malnutrition among women and children. The scheme essentially targets children in the age group of zero to six years and women in the reproductive age group. The problem is that the ICDS is seen as the success story behind...

This has to be the ultimate irony. Barely a few weeks after a Supreme Court committee comes out with a verdict that the public distribution system is bust and needs a drastic overhaul, the government clears a food security bill that seeks to push more food through this very same burst pipe. If newspaper reports are to be believed, the Congress president is not happy with even this and wants...

Today, we have reached a historic milestone in our country's struggle for children's right to education. The Constitution (86th Amendment) Act, 2002, making elementary education a Fundamental Right, and its consequential legislation, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, comes into force today. The enforcement of this right represents a momentous step forward in our 100-year struggle for universalising elementary education. Over the years, the demand...

Only seven states pay average wages of Rs100 or more per day to workers under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s flagship rural welfare programme, despite the Congress party, which heads the government, promising to make Rs100 every worker’s entitlement last year. The UPA had fixed the daily wage of workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)—which promises at least 100 days of work annually to one...

“We are angry, and upset, and do not want these wages,” says Parmila, an illiterate widow from Chittoriya panchayat in Bihar's Katihar district. Her pithy statement sums up the collective current of emotions running through the minds of the 60-odd women workers of Chittoriya, who were paid wages well below the minimum for a six-day work completed in January. As many as 123 workers from Chittoriya, half of them women, were paid...