-The Indian Express Kavita Desai, project director of the urban community development programme of the municipal corporation, said, “We are following the bpl list from 2000.” As soon as the doors of the goods wagon slid shut at the railway yard in Vadodara, a group of women tiptoed in, armed with brooms, sieves and cloth bags. They gently slipped under the wheels of the train, each staking claim to a spot. Then,...

  A French journalist once wrote: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Perhaps the same can be said about nutritional status of children in West Bengal at present in comparison to the past. At the time when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, was entertaining private capital in Singur and Nandigram, the rate of undernutrition was quite high in his state. A little less than...

-The Hindu The public health care system, if adequately funded, is still the better alternative in a developing and complex country like India The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), by consensus, has adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of objectives meant to improve the lives of millions of poor in the world. Among these, access to quality health care and freedom from disease is of paramount importance in helping societies...

-The Times of India Jaipur: An auto rickshaw driver got paper sheets weighing 39 kg in reply to an RTI query he filed seeking information on the 1.5 bigahs of his father's cultivable land that was acquired by Rajasthan State Industrial Development and Investment Corporation (RIICO) some 20 years ago in Udaipur's Bhoiyon-ki-pancholi village. The reason was that he suspected foul play as there were others in the village whose land had...

-The Hindu The National Food Security Act is finally making headway in the poorest States. Amplified by reforms in the Public Distribution System, a modicum of nutritional support and economic security to all vulnerable households is now a real possibility. Dhobargram is a small Santhal village in Bankura district of West Bengal, with 100 households or so. Most of them are poor, or even very poor, by any plausible standard. There are...