-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In a move that will benefit over 27 crore children across the country, the health ministry has expanded its Deworming programme to convert it into a national initiative seeking to cover as many as 536 districts over the next one year. The programme was earlier limited to 277 districts in 11 high-burden states, and covered nine crore children in 2015. The government has decided to ramp...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: For 10 months, the Narendra Modi administration withheld from the public the findings of a study by India's government and Unicef that charts "unprecedented" improvement in child malnutrition over the past decade but shows Gujarat in an unflattering light. Under pressure after The Economist reported the findings a fortnight ago, the government last week released the national-level data from the Rapid Survey on Children. But it is still...

-The Hindu We could hold people accountable to a reasonable standard of expectation and that's the first step, says economist Esther Duflo In 2003, French-American economist Esther Duflo co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan. In just over ten years, JPAL has carried out 568 field experiments - or Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) - in 56 countries,...

-The Hindu The role of education in reducing poverty is widely recognised but our planners are yet to realise how the impoverished struggle with a learning process that is unresponsive to their needs In a society where poverty is far more common than prosperity, one would expect the implications of poverty for education to be widely recognised. What we find, instead, is that poverty is seldom mentioned directly in policy documents on...

-IANS   In order to promote personal hygene among young rural girls, Tamil Nadu launched distribution of free sanitary napkins to girls in the age group of 10 to 19 in all the villages. In a statement issued here Friday by the government, Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa has ordered distribution of free sanitary napkins to young girls as well as lactating mothers and women prisoners across the state at an annual outlay of...