School meals ensure nutrition for millions of vulnerable children across the world. Almost 370 million children worldwide are covered by school feeding programmes. While 100 million school children benefitted from the noon meal scheme in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Brazil (48 million), China (44 million), South Africa (9 million) and Nigeria (9 million) too run similar programmes for school children. However, an estimated 39 billion in-school...

-Firstpost.com The biggest hoodwink is the starved Poshan Abhiyan 2.0, which though merges the Supplementary Nutrition Programme and the Poshan Abhiyan, has been allocated an amount less than what was prescribed for Anganwadi services in 2020 In a post-truth world, the plain cold statistics in the fine print of the Union Budget 2021 often reveal more than the Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's speech. The budget for NREGA labourers has been slashed despite...

Commenting on the recently released fifth round of National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data for 17 states and five Union Territories (UTs) in an article published in The Indian Express (dated 6th January, 2021), Arvind Subramanian and his co-authors have stated that India has made progress on certain outcomes, including infant mortality rate (IMR), under-five mortality rate (U5MR) and neonatal mortality rate (NNMR). Relying on various rounds of NFHS data,...

-The Hindu Snag comes amid rising levels of hunger and poverty. Some States have developed their own software modules A massive nutrition portal developed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), which is used by the Centre as well as most States, and touted as the world’s biggest nutrition system, to record and monitor delivery of services to children and mothers across nearly seven lakh anganwadis has been down for nearly...

-Scroll.in The unprecedented reversal comes after 15 years of steady progress by India in reducing infant deaths On November 8, 2016, the Indian government undertook a drastic policy decision, choosing to ban high value currency notes in circulation. Overnight, 86% of India’s currency became worthless, throwing live and livelihoods in disarray. Now new research is pointing to the widespread impact this dislocation might have had on human development. A new paper by economists...