School meals ensure nutrition for millions of vulnerable children across the world. Almost 370 million children worldwide are covered by school feeding programmes. While 100 million school children benefitted from the noon meal scheme in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Brazil (48 million), China (44 million), South Africa (9 million) and Nigeria (9 million) too run similar programmes for school children. However, an estimated 39 billion in-school...

-The Hindu Study highlights the socio-economic impact of accidents There are more fatalities from road crashes among poor families rather than the rich shows a new World Bank study that highlights the socio-economic impact of road accidents — from access to post-accident medical care to coping with the financial distress caused by a mishap. In the study, low income households reported twice the numbers of deaths post-crash vis-à-vis high income households. The risk...

-The Hindu That there is no targeted employment programme to alleviate the immediate crisis is a matter of concern The Budget, at its simplest, is the government’s tentative income and expenditure statement. Like all financial statements, the devil lies in the fine print. At its broadest, the Budget is a pious statement of the government’s policy and ideological intentions. It is also the government’s statement of how it seeks to tackle the...

-Down to Earth This weak link between growth in income and nutritional outcomes requires the attention of policy makers The Covid pandemic reminds us that we may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. Low-income countries like India faced a multi-pronged crisis during the pandemic — containing the infections while being home to 195.9 million of the 821 million undernourished people in the world. Prevalence of undernourishment in India...

-Newsclick.in No scheme touches them, no law reaches them – but they hope that a better deal for farmers will benefit them. At the Ghazipur border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, Manish and a few of his friends have joined the farmers’ dharna only a few days back. They live in Baghpat district, barely a few dozen kilometres from the protest site but it could be another continent, or another age. “In the...