-The Telegraph New Delhi: For 10 months, the Narendra Modi administration withheld from the public the findings of a study by India's government and Unicef that charts "unprecedented" improvement in child malnutrition over the past decade but shows Gujarat in an unflattering light. Under pressure after The Economist reported the findings a fortnight ago, the government last week released the national-level data from the Rapid Survey on Children. But it is still...

-The Indian Express Urban poor are highest in Manipur, Mizoram, Bihar, least in Goa and Delhi Unreleased data from the first urban Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), tabulated as per criteria laid down by the erstwhile Planning Commission’s expert Hashim committee, shows that roughly 35 per cent of urban Indian households live below poverty line (BPL). This amounts to 22 million households of the total 63 million households surveyed in 4,041...

-The Indian Express Reducing preventable disease should be a developmental priority. Government needs to invest in a healthier future. Indians are famous for our savings mentality. The 2014 Towers Watson Global Benefits Attitude Survey found that Indians had the second-highest savings rate, after the Chinese. We save for a variety of reasons, to create a safety net and to yield returns in future. While there is a time to save, there...

The nation can be proud of running some of the world's largest programmes on social safety nets, says the latest report by World Bank. However, public spending on safety nets is still low in comparison to neighbouring countries Bangladesh and Pakistan. India tops the list of 136 countries for running the world's largest school feeding programme i.e. the Mid Day Meal Scheme (MDMS), and also the biggest public works programme i.e....

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Landlessness and dependence on manual casual labour for a livelihood are key deprivations facing rural families, socio-economic census figures suggest. This, experts say, means they are far more vulnerable to impoverishment than indicated by a plain reading of the census data. While 48.5 per cent of all rural households are saddled with at least one deprivation indicator, the eye-opener is how much the other factors overlap with...