-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today asked the Centre to explain its failure to implement the previous government's flagship food security programme, aimed at providing cheap grains to two-thirds of the population with a special focus on children and pregnant and lactating women. The scheme, estimated to cost Rs 1.25 lakh crore a year, was launched in 2013 and was to come into force from July last year. But the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's food safety regulator has slashed the maximum allowed limit of transfats in cooking oil and fat by half to five per cent in a move that experts are calling an important step to safeguard public health. But Nutrition scientists have cautioned that the government will also need to tweak oilseed crop policies to draw the food processing industry and consumers away from unhealthy but inexpensive transfats to...

-Down to Earth A report blames ineffective policies, lack of budget and the absence of better monitoring policies for poor performance India has shown little improvement in breastfeeding infants and ensuring healthy diet to young children, a report by the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI) and the Public Health Resource Network (PHRN) says. The study blames gaps in the implementation of government policies for the dismal performance. Since 2004, the report...

-Economic and Political Weekly While insufficient sanitation facilities often get represented in statistics and are reported in the literature on urban infrastructure planning and contested urban spaces, what is often left out is the everyday practice and experience of going to dysfunctional toilets, particularly by women. By analysing the practices and problems associated with toilet use from a phenomenological perspective, this article aims to situate the issue in the everyday lives...

-The Hindu Eight States have reduced the proportion of underweight children. New official data on Nutrition in India’s nine poorest States has shown that while most states have successfully reduced the number of underweight children over the last decade, their record in reducing child stunting has been more mixed. While Bihar and Uttarkhand improved on all indicators, Uttar Pradesh got worse on all. The Office of the Registrar General of India released the...