A new report suggests that 175 million children will be affected every year by frequent natural disasters caused due to climate change. Painting a grim future, a report by child rights NGO Save the Children said climate change was the biggest global health threat to children that could increase risk of deaths due to diarrhoea, malnutrition, malaria and other diseases because of reduced community access to clean water, nutritious food...

Good nutrition is the nexus point where food security, public health and environmental protection meet.  As world leaders in Copenhagen struggle for an ambitious deal, let us not forget that it is the future of our children that is at stake. Hurricanes, floods, heat-waves and droughts wreak havoc when they strike, but in the desolation they leave behind it’s relatively easy to reconstruct a road or a house. A human...

In a year of sparse rains and spiralling food prices, with hundreds of districts being officially declared as drought-hit, a rally by activists in the capital demands a Food Entitlements Act.  Perhaps the most vocal demands at the rally were those aimed at a complete revamp of the Public Distribution System (PDS), starting with universal — instead of targeted — coverage. Over 5,000 grassroots activists, agricultural workers, farmers, lawyers, doctors and...

The road to Khardung La begins in the Indian town of Leh on the northwestern fringe of the Himalayas. Exhaust-spewing army trucks rattle up the side of dry rock, past Buddhist monasteries clinging to the craggy mountainside and alongside small farms barely scraping fertility from the earth. Khardung La, the highest motorable mountain pass in the world, is more than 18,000 ft. above sea level, the air so thin that...

According to a report by Shirish Khare in NewsWing.com, a news portal dedicated to raising the issues of the voiceless in the Hindi belt, 25 children have died in just two villages of Meghnagar block in the month of October at the tribal dominated Jhabua district of Madhya Pradesh. The report (see text link below) cites under-nutrition as the likely reason for the tragedy. The alarming NewsWing.com report says that the...