-Down to Earth If any other cause was responsible for so many deaths and injuries as we see on our roads it would have been a state of emergency Sunita Narain-our colleague and friend-was seriously injured in an accident while cycling yesterday. A car hit her and fled. This cruel act of crime and heartlessness could have shattered our faith in humanity had it not been for the kind act of the...

Released two days before the World Food Day i.e. 16 October, the Global Hunger Index 2013 report paints a gloomy picture of India. Its score of fighting hunger has improved only marginally in the past two decades while many of its neighbors have moved up from strength to strength. (See full report below)   The report entitled: The Challenge of Hunger: Building Resilience to achieve Food and Nutrition Security says that India...

-Newsclick.in Recent studies have shown that even as India fares better than many developing regions of the world on several indicators of growth and development such as GDP, per capita, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), literacy, life expectancy, etc., the number of malnourished children in India is significantly high. What explains this paradox? The Union Cabinet recently approved a multi-sectoral nutritional programme proposed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development to reduce...

-The Hindu In addition to ailments caused by poverty, salt pan workers across the country suffer from several occupational diseases, including chronic dermatitis, loss of vision and hypothyroidism In Adivasi Colony, a remote hamlet off the road from Vedaranyam to Kodikarai in Tamil Nadu, most of the adults in the 200-odd households work in salt manufacturing. They prepare salt pans manually, irrigate them with saline water which is three times saltier than...

-Down to Earth Prevalence of underweight children down from 76 to 43 per cent for boys, 74 to 42 per cent for girls over past four decades, says National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau Food intake of people in rural India has been declining over the past four decades, but the status of nutrition among children has improved over this period. This was revealed in third repeat survey by National Nutrition Monitoring...