-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today asked the Centre to explain its failure to implement the previous government's flagship food security programme, aimed at providing cheap grains to two-thirds of the population with a special focus on children and pregnant and lactating women. The scheme, estimated to cost Rs 1.25 lakh crore a year, was launched in 2013 and was to come into force from July last year. But the...

-Frontline A survey conducted by the Women and Child Development Ministry and UNICEF in 28 States and Delhi presents a dismal picture of crucial maternal and child health indicators. ONE OF the success stories that successive governments at the Centre have regularly narrated is the improvement in maternal and child health indicators, including coverage of various facilities and services that directly or indirectly affect the health and well-being of these cohort...

-Hindustan Times A nutrition plan within the National Food Security Act meant for pregnant women and Lactating Mothers, a vulnerable group that skews India’s hunger indices, looks quietly buried. It still runs as a trial in 52 districts, two years after the landmark legislation was signed into law. The Centre hasn’t yet begun budgeting for it to expand the maternal health scheme to cover the whole country. While a parallel scheme under...

-Frontline Odisha shows the way in the implementation of the ICDS scheme to ensure that children receive nutrition and care in their earliest years, but the Centre’s moves to slash budgetary allocations could wreak havoc on such programmes. At the Tasarda anganwadi centre in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district, as the auxiliary nurse and midwife (ANM) pulled out the blood pressure (BP) instrument to check a pregnant woman, the children at the anganwadi began...

-Tehelka If governance is his priority, Narendra Modi has to detach politics from welfare schemes. He has to ensure that the locals are treated as critical stakeholders It is a fight that has raged on for a decade. It is a battle to ensure that poor children and deprived pregnant and lactating women get a nutritious diet. It is a war to rightfully implement the grandiose central scheme, Integrated Child Development Services...