Jharkhand numbers better than Bihar, Chhattisgarh; but chief minister Munda beset with own problems Controversial as it may have become, Planning Commission data indicates that poverty levels have fallen in Jharkhand in spite of well documented bouts of political instability that have often plagued the Maoist-hit state. The latest data released by the commission suggests that the number of poor in Jharkhand dipped by 6.2 per cent between 2004-05 and 2009-10, a...

HINDIYANKALAN, India – One afternoon last November, 10 people in this eastern Indian village sat in a circle on a dirt road and told us about their fight against hunger. We wanted to know: What would drive a person to eat a poisoned root? I was on a research assignment with my colleague Ankita Aggarwal from the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi think tank. It was part of a...

Over the past week, I’ve chronicled my investigative research on starvation in India – a project I’ve been working on with a colleague from the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi think tank. We’ve told stories of people who were forced to eat poisoned roots to stay alive; a family that suffered the deaths of members from three different generations in a span of 24 hours; a woman faced with...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...

Health ministry instead plans to roll out an integrated national health survey; experts question decision   The Union government has decided to discontinue the country’s most reliable and widely tracked health survey, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), the fourth round of which was to be conducted in 2012-13, in a move that has been criticized by development experts. The ministry of health and family welfare is instead planning to roll out an...