-AP NEW DELHI: As India wakes up on Monday to smoke-filled skies from a weekend of festival fireworks, New Delhi's worst season for air pollution begins, with dire consequences. A new report from UNICEF says most of the 2 billion children in the world who are breathing toxic air live in north India and neighbouring countries, risking serious health effects, including damage to their lungs, brains and other organs. Of that global...

-The Hindu Economic growth alone is not enough to achieve key Sustainable Development Goals. It must translate into jobs for the poor and marginalised India is the fastest growing large economy in the world today. Despite this, one in every five Indians is poor. Multilateral agencies as well as governments are playing an active role in understanding problems relating to poverty and hunger and finding solutions to them. But these challenges are...

-Frontline.in The PDS, the ICDS and the MDM schemes constitute lifelines for a vast majority of the population. Maternity entitlements need to be seen both as a right for women and as instruments in the battle against undernutrition. A government that ignores or undermines them does so at its own peril. THE GLOBAL HUNGER INDEX 2016 puts India at 97 out of 118 countries. The release of these numbers is great...

-Frontline.in In the latest Global Hunger Index, India is bracketed in the category of countries where hunger levels are “serious”. But the policy responses on hunger and malnutrition in the country have been inadequate and faulty. In the second week of October, a few media reports in India highlighted significant data pertaining to global hunger. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) had released its Global Hunger Index (GHI), rating 118...

-The Hindu Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal have stolen a march over India in quality of school education. Data from new research on female literacy show that India’s school education system is under-performing in terms of quality when compared to its neighbours, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. The research studies changes in female literacy over a number of schooling years. The proportion of women who completed five years of primary schooling in India and were...