-Newsclick.in An average urban family suffers from chronic undernutrition, with its food consumption deficient in protein, energy, and important vitamins and minerals. A recently released report on the Nutritional Status of Urban Population by National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (NNMB), throws light on the chronic undernutrition faced by India’s urban population, particularly the urban poor. The report compares the average consumption of different food groups by the urban population, to the scientifically calculated Required...

-Down to Earth Why did we grant Pfizer's claim on a pneumonia vaccine which has been rejected elsewhere? In august, the medical and public health fraternity was stunned when India’s Patent Office granted US pharma giant Pfizer’s claim on its vaccine against pneumonia, the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV), marketed as Prevnar13. For a country that has stricter patentability criteria than most others, India’s decision was baffling because Pfizer’s patent has been rejected...

-National Herald With a GHI of 31.4, India is at the high end of the “serious” category and this highlights the need for an urgent focus on interventions towards reducing malnutrition in the country The release of the Global Hunger Index (GHI) has once again brought the poor state of nutrition in India onto the spotlight. Although there are improvements in India’s hunger and nutrition indicators, on the whole its rank has...

-Outlook Jholawala Dreze’s ‘research for action’ gets close to the people at the end of public policy. These essays urge greater collaboration between activists and economists. SENSE AND SOLIDARITY: JHOLAWALA ECONOMICS FOR EVERYONEBY JEAN DREZE PERMANENT BLACK | PAGES: 354 | RS. 795 Manmohan Singh attracted much lampooning and ridicule during and after his ten-year-long tenure as PM for the nature of the relationship of his government with 10, Janpath. One of the...

Confirming the rising trend of prevalence of wasting (i.e. too thin for height) among children below 5 years of age, a new report on the state of global hunger shows that during 2017 India ranks 100th among 119 countries in terms of Global Hunger Index (GHI). Entitled 2017 Global Hunger Index: The Inequalities of Hunger, the report indicates that the neighbouring countries such as China (GHI score: 7.5; GHI rank:...