-The Telegraph New Delhi: A sub-committee of the highest advisory body on education has recommended including a provision for punishing parents if they don't send their wards to schools. A draft report placed before a meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (Cabe) on Monday said the Right to Education Act needed to be looked into afresh. "The provisions of the RTE Act 2009 need to be re-looked as there is no...

-The Hindu Experts fault anaemia among women in child-bearing age and poor sanitation Chennai: Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) is high among under-5 children at 8% in Tamil Nadu, according to the National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4) data released in 2017. Defined by a very low weight-for-height and by visible severe wasting, or by the presence of nutritional oedema (swelling of feet, for example), according to the World Health Organization (WHO), SAM incidence among...

-The Times of India An NGO in Chhattisgarh is addressing the urgent deficit in nutrition by providing three meals a day to children under three along with daycare Sumita Dhruv's life revolves around rice — sowing, irrigating, and harvesting it. And yet very little of it reaches her two-year-old daughter Shristi. Like most children in the village of Baigahara, 50 km from Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, Shristi was born underweight. Her eyes were...

-Frontline.in The Assembly elections have put under intense scrutiny Narendra Modi’s Gujarat model of development which is touted as worthy of replication throughout the country. Audit reports of the CAG provide ample evidence of it being inefficient, corrupt and not beneficial to the common people. THE standard indicators of development, as is understood in theory and practice, comprise a range of indices, and not necessarily the level of private investment in...

-TheWire.in Based on a militarised notion of ‘targeting’, such welfare policies deny citizens the right to basic services. In an incisive analysis on anti-poverty and other social security programmes, Professor Amartya Sen astutely asks why the notion of targeting, which is essentially a military concept, is so routinely invoked in analytical discourses on basic welfare rights for the people as well as in policy framing in this respect. Indeed, why would an...