-The Hindu Delhi, Kerala and Tamil Nadu are India's best-ranked States in terms of gender-related education indicators, new data from the Ministry of Human Resource Development and UNICEF, shows. Using district-level indicators of girls' education, health and social disadvantages, the government aims to identify the most backward pockets of the country, requiring the most attention. "Earlier, we used to look at the gender gap in indicators, and this is narrowing. However this,...

-Economic and Political Weekly The National Sample Survey Office's survey of consumption expenditure is woefully inadequate for estimating the number of food-insecure households in India. Future surveys of NSSO need to collect information on the four pillars of food security: availability, access, nutritional adequacy/utilisation and stability. The Comprehensive Nutrition Survey in Maharashtra is an example of such a survey and appears to do a decent job of capturing the different elements...

-The Hindu The Adivasis of Central India, who settled in the tea gardens of Assam decades ago, are still devoid of their basic rights. The even greater tragedy of the coordinated murderous December 23, 2014, attack on unarmed Adivasi forest dwellers in Assam, which left dead more than 70 people including children and women, is that the assault targeted one of the most oppressed and dispossessed communities in that entire region. A meticulously...

-The Hindustan Times The drafting of the National Health Policy (NHP) 2015 is an extremely welcome development. The government's decision to announce Health as a Right is a huge advance. Public health spending as a share of GDP barely rose from 0.9 to 1.1% under the previous government. Governments in rich countries have been spending 5% of GDP on health for decades. Why should we welcome the NHP 2015? Countries with...

-The Hindu With a plethora of government departments and international organisations putting out so much statistical data in the public space, often contradicting one another, it is the government's duty to clear the air with up-to-date and coherent statistical data linking social and economic indicators Purchasing Power Parity or PPP has validated a long held surmise that the poorer countries are not as badly off as they are made out to be...