-The Hindu A letter to the Prime Minister on the importance of a ‘near-universal PDS.' July 21, 2011 Dr. Manmohan Singh Prime Minister of India Respected Prime Minister, We are a group of research scholars and student volunteers who have just spent three weeks surveying the Public Distribution System (PDS) around the country. We are writing to share a few thoughts on the National Food Security Act in the light of this experience. Our survey covered...
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Sex tests hit rural India by Rukmini Srinivasan & Himanshi Dhawan
Fears on the rampant use of pre-natal sex determination technology in rural areas have been confirmed with census data indicating that child sex ratio (CSR) fell far more sharply in villages than in urban areas in the last decade. According to provision data on population, though the urban CSR is far worse than that in rural areas, the fall in CSR in rural areas is around four times than that in...
More »Maternal mortality rises in Bengal but goal within reach
-The Telegraph Bengal is the only state in India where maternal mortality rate has increased over a recent three-year period, although it is close to achieving key millennium development goal targets, indicating human and social development, for 2015. The findings of the latest nation-wide sample registration survey (SRS) shows that India’s maternal mortality rate (MMR), the number of women between 15 and 49 years dying from childbirth associated causes per 100,000...
More »Looking Three Ways by Ramachandra Guha
On May 23, the president of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi, laid the foundation stone of a bridge being built across the river Ravi, linking Jammu and Kashmir with Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. Ten days later, she was in Rajasthan, inaugurating the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. For both trips she had to travel far from her place of residence, which — given her position — would have involved careful planning beforehand,...
More »Funding, the key by Jayati Ghosh
It is essential for India to raise the level of public expenditure in education to ensure quality. THE failure of the Indian state more than six decades after Independence to provide universal access to quality schooling and to ensure equal access to higher education among all socio-economic groups and across gender and region must surely rank among the more dismal and significant failures of the development project in the country....
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