Adding to the debate over celebrity economists blaming India’s malnutrition and stunting vis-à-vis Sub Saharan Africa on genetic differences, Dean Spears, a public health expert and a visiting fellow at Delhi School of Economics, offers evidence connecting our poor sanitation and open defecation with high morbidity and malnutrition. (see both links below). In an evidence-based paper titled Policy Lessons from Implementing India’s Total Sanitation Campaign (2012), based on the review...

-The Guardian Half of Indians have no toilet. It's one of many gigantic failures that have prompted Nobel prize-winning academic Amartya Sen to write a devastating critique of India's economic boom The roses are blooming at the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings. There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction...

-Grist Media The proposed Food Security Bill will likely raise the demand for dal across India. While farmers and consumers are against it, the government keeps favouring the agri-industry and importing more and more cheap versions to offset rising inflation. But why won't India produce its own dal anymore? Nowhere are Canada's agricultural production plans tracked more closely than in India's Ministry of Food & Consumer Affairs. As it struggles to meet...

-The Hindu The recent launch of the first Dalit venture fund occasions an examination of the moral and ethical emptiness of capitalism History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics B.R. Ambedkar If only Milind Kamble, founder of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI) and Chandra Bhan Prasad, Dalit thinker, columnist and DICCI mentor, had imbibed the wisdom of Manning Marable's How Capitalism Underdeveloped...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: As patent wars heat up in the pharma space, mobile phone messages and Right to Information filings have emerged as potent weapons in the hands of multinationals keen to delay competition from low-cost generic versions of their patented products in India. Innovator drugmakers, who used to strike with patent suits after generic drugmakers released their versions in the market, have started gleaning information from text messages sent...