-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The National Monitoring Committee for midday meal (MDM) scheme that met on Tuesday was told there are areas of serious concerns with the flagship programme. For instance, it was pointed out there is unavailability of eating plates in most of the schools. Report by various monitoring institutions (MIs) also said there is a delay in delivering cooking costs from state to school, cook-cum-helpers were getting irregular...

-The Times of India RANCHI: Chief minister Raghubar Das on Friday said that the government will appoint 12,000 women 'poshan sakhis' (nutrition companions) contract workers to implement and monitor various government schemes aimed at tackling the problem of malnutrition in schools. Das said that under the new scheme, three lakh students covering 40,000 schools in the state would benefit. The announcement while inaugurating additional nourishment scheme which is an extension of the...

The India Country Report 2015 on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comes at a time when the Union Budget 2015-16 allegedly cut expenditure on several social sector schemes and programmes. This year's MDG country report says that India will fail to achieve two important targets pertaining to reducing hunger and maternal mortality by 2015, among others. Released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), the report says that India is...

-Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) Press Release   New Delhi: The direction indicated by the Finance Minister's Budget Speech in general and that of the taxation policies in particular indicate a quantum leap being taken towards market fundamentalism. In the absence of any increase in the overall spending capacity of the government (Centre and States combined), the steps for fiscal decentralization (from Centre to States) have been constrained, implying only...

-Oxfam Blog Vanita Suneja, Oxfam India's Economic Justice Lead, argues that India can't progress until it tackles rural poverty. This entry was posted on 3 February 2015. More than 800 million of India's 1.25 billion people live in the countryside. One quarter of rural India's population is below the official poverty line - 216 million people. A search for economic justice for a population of this magnitude is never going to be...