-Live Mint At a time when India plans a multi-pronged attack on malnutrition in 200 high-burden districts, it will pay to examine the cracks in state institutions that have led to past failures and can still derail well-intentioned plans. Melghat, a tribal corner in the northeastern fringes of India’s richest state—Maharashtra—is an apt example of almost everything that has gone wrong in India’s response to malnutrition and child deaths. Every 14th child dies...

The Union home ministry has identified bureaucrats who are being “cultivated” by foreign intelligence operatives to push their agenda through the granting of personal favours, such as courses in foreign universities. In a strongly worded note to all secretaries of the Union government, home secretary RK Singh has asked heads of departments to restrain bureaucrats from hobnobbing with foreign embassies in India. While promising to take action against officials who have been...

-The United Nations Despite improvements in access to water, sanitation and hygiene, the coverage of these services could fall behind if adequate resources are not secured, the United Nations inter-agency group focused on water issues warned in a report released today. The report, released by UN-Water and the World Health Organization (WHO), provides data for 74 developing countries, and stresses that these nations have a chronic lack of technicians and Staff in...

-The United Nations An independent United Nations human rights expert today hailed a decision by the Indian Supreme Court to uphold a law which mandates that a quarter of the places in the county’s private and public schools should be reserved for disadvantaged groups. “Exclusion and poverty remain the most important obstacles to the realization of the right to education in all regions of the world,” said the Special Rapporteur on the...

Money from the Department for International Development has helped pay for a controversial programme that has led to miscarriages and even deaths after botched operations Tens of millions of pounds of UK aid money have been spent on a programme that has forcibly sterilised Indian women and men, the Observer has learned. Many have died as a result of botched operations, while others have been left bleeding and in agony. A...