-Report by Delhi Solidarity Group The Government of India presented its annual budget with much fanfare, claiming it to be propoor and pro-rural, but the question looms whether it will really change the lives of the marginalized sections of the society. For a country like India that claims to be ‘democratic, socialist, sovereign, republic’ working towards the ‘welfare’ of its citizens it might be assumed that the key areas on priority...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The government is set to recast its focus towards nutrition with a set of new schemes that will take off in the coming financial year. The Union Budget has also increased allocations for the National Nutrition Mission and establishment of new labs for testing food given under the scheme. Expressing satisfaction with the budget allocations women and child development minister Maneka Gandhi said, "All our schemes...

-The Hindu   With an eye on the upcoming elections in different States, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has declared that he is presenting a Budget that provides “additional resources for vulnerable sections, rural areas and social and physical infrastructure”. But since aggregate expenditure in nominal terms is slated to rise by just 10.8 per cent between this financial year and the next, that seems difficult to believe. Consider, for example, the...

Although there is sufficient data and evidence available in the public domain to argue whether there has been halving of poverty between 1990 and 2015, the same cannot be said with conviction about the halving of hunger—one of the targets set under the erstwhile Millennium Development Goals framework (replaced recently by SDGs). This is because the recently released data by the National Family Health Survey-4 (conducted in 2015-16) and the...

-Observer Research Foundation It is not often discussed in India that there was a time, not too far into the past, when the doctors from the famous All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) performed and promoted sex-selective abortions as an effective and ethical method to address India’s population problem. Some of them even suggested that “the couple keeps on reproducing just to have a son”, and prenatal determination of sex...