Nearly 400 people have been admitted to hospitals in north India after eating adulterated flour, police say. All the patients had consumed snacks made from buckwheat flour. A mill in the northern state of Rajasthan has been traced as the source, police said. The patients complained of vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach ache. Cases of food poisoning have been reported from the capital, Delhi, and Towns of Meerut, Ghaziabad and Bulandshar in Uttar Pradesh...

Distribution of basic food grains and fuel at controlled prices every month through the Public Distribution System (PDS) could be the largest service provided by the Indian State, touching as it does over 65 million families through a network of nearly half a million retail shops. Given that the urban middle class has little stake in the health of the PDS, there have to be some compelling reasons for the...

The population of India’s commercial capital is growing very slowly in the suburbs while it is shrinking in the old city, the preliminary census data on Maharashtra released on Friday shows. Meanwhile, the population of adjoining Thane district has grown explosively at 35.9% between 2001 and 2011, as expensive real estate in the city has pushed people to satellite Towns such as Kalyan and Vashi in this district. The shift in people...

India has added 181 million new people to its population over the last decade, according to the results of the 2011 census. India's population is now 1.21bn, which is bigger than the combined populations of the US, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan and Bangladesh. India launched the latest census exercise last year. Some 2.5 million officials visited households in about 7,000 Towns and 600,000 villages. The population was classified according to gender, religion, education and occupation. The...

Later this week, the Registrar General of India (RGI) will unveil the first flush of its findings from the 15th census. This once-in-a-decade effort is the seventh in independent India and is expected to showcase an entirely new set of vital statistics, consistent with the ongoing social and economic transformation of the country and something that should enthuse demographers and policy planners alike. Expectations are that the array of socio-economic data...