Pilot survey under Project Dipankar in four prosperous districts shows 87 per cent class I students of government schools are undernourished Eighty-seven per cent school children in four districts of West Bengal are undernourished right at the entry level. The shocking numbers are from the yet unpublished report of Project Dipankar, a child tracking system initiated by the department of school education in the state. The project tracks the educational performance...

-Live Mint   As United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi prepares to intervene next week in the great national debate about who is poor, she might want to visit north-eastern Mumbai to see how the poorest are not even classified as such and how a giant government scheme to save their children from malnutrition is failing. The nauseating stench from a mountain of garbage greets a visitor to Rafi Nagar at the base...

As a national debate rages over the Indian poverty line, in the heart of Bandra, one of Mumbai’s richest suburbs, in a shanty with barely enough standing space for two adults, three-year-old Priya Doiphode, clad in a red tee shirt, lies listless on a string bed. Priya is one of the 83,243 children in Mumbai who are malnourished, according to government data, a statistic that makes Mumbai the most malnourished...

As many as 56 villages in the Saranda forests, freed from over 10 years of Maoist dominance in a month-long offensive in August, is set to see a new era of development with the Centre planning to showcase it as a test case to prove that police action is no impediment to building social infrastructure. Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, who visited the Jharkhand capital last week, has sent a...

Both Nandan Nilekani and his well-wishers are today, two years after he set out on his unique identification (UID) journey, wiser if not a more disillusioned lot. Right at the outset he had acknowledged concerns over privacy issues, saying, “India does not really have a privacy law. So all this will act as an impetus to define the privacy framework for Indians.” That gaping hole is still staring us in...