-The Times of India Silently, the warp and weft of Indian families is changing, perhaps forever. Women are getting married later, they are having babies later and the gap between successive children is getting larger. Put this together with the fact that the average number of children born to a woman continues to decline, and children survive more than in the past, and you can see that families are being much...

-Economic and Political Weekly     The pace of decline in infant mortality in India has quickened in recent years after the introduction of the National Rural Health Mission. However, the post-neonatal deaths have declined faster than the neonatal deaths despite the emphasis on preventing the latter in the health mission. Apart from a number of reasons, this is linked to the poor quality of the public health services in general, and the...

-Live Mint The absence of genuine competition at mandis and numerous transaction charges are distorting onion prices The joke doing the rounds today is that the spike in onion prices has been a great equalizer, bringing parity between the price of a bottle of beer and a kilo of onion. The humble vegetable has also found pride of place as a gift item to customers at a tyre shop in Jamshedpur,...

-The Times of India With the state budget all set to be presented on July 12, TOI takes a hard look at the government's cheap rice scheme and its impact on politics and employment. Will cheap rice boil? Let's look at the math. Reducing the price from Rs 3 to Re 1 per kg will help a family save Rs 60 per month. Till now, poor families got rice from the Public Distribution...

-The Times of India BANGALORE: India's burgeoning population appears to be both a problem and an advantage. Very soon, the southern states are likely to stare at an un-Indian situation: a shrinking populace, owing to a sharp dip in the fertility rate of women. Analyzing the 2011 Census data, the Population Research Centre of the Bangalore-based Institute for Social and Economic Change found that many southern districts, a significant number of them...