-Press Release from Centre for Budget Analysis (CBGA) and Jan Awaaz New Delhi, 29 November 2014: There have been a number of media reports recently around possible cuts in Union Budget allocations for the current fiscal 2014-15 in case of social sector programmes, i.e. reductions in allocations in the Revised Estimates (RE) for 2014-15 as compared to the Budget Estimates (BE) that were made in July this year. This issue deserves...

-Livemint Hidden hunger can be addressed by ensuring that households (and women and children within households) have access to diverse diets Minister for women and child development Maneka Gandhi recently announced that her ministry would urgently put together a comprehensive, time-bound action plan to tackle malnutrition. This is a welcome step and hopefully this time around, such a plan will be more than superficial statements of intent and actually make a difference...

-The Times of India   NEW DELHI: The highways ministry is looking at entering into long-term contracts with cement majors across the country to purchase the construction material at a lower cost and shift to concrete roads, which are seen to be more durable although they cost more than those made using bitumen. Road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari - who had announced his support for concrete the day he took...

-Down to Earth   This defies logic. Despite rapid economic growth, India has often been placed below sub-Saharan African countries that have very high number of malnourished children. But the government has no data to clarify its position. In the first week of September, Parliament’s Committee on Estimates criticised the government, saying: “The committee is surprised to note that in the modern era of Information and Technology, there is no recent official...

-Economic and Political Weekly A number of independent estimates have been made of the cost of implementation of the National Food Security Bill, now an Act. However, these estimates are either based on wrong assumptions or work with numbers that are not in the public domain. The one thing that most of them share is an attempt to demonstrate that the costs will be unaffordable. Please click here to access the entire...