-The Indian Express Patient shelters must become part of urban infrastructure. Ramkishan Yadav (name changed) hails from Begusarai district in Bihar. He has been in Delhi for the past seven months to complete the treatment of his 11-year-old son, who suffers from a “treatable” form of bone cancer. The father and son live on the footpath in front of the main gate of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in...

-Hindustan Times E Sreedharan says he also doesn’t agree that the Indian Railways has made rapid progress. He cites that apart from bio-toilets, there has been no technical upgradation and accident record has not improved either. Having revolutionised the way urban people commute, Elattuvalappil Sreedharan, 86, a retired civil engineer, has taken up the challenge of laying down standards for the metro rail system. In an interview with Ramesh Babu, the ‘Metro...

-Civil Society News New Delhi: In 1974, Dr Samir Chaudhuri, a paediatrician working in Kolkata’s slums, founded Child in Need Institute (CINI) to tackle the many dimensions of child malnutrition. It struck him at the time that malnutrition wasn’t just a clinical problem but a complex phenomenon rooted in gender issues. Over the years, led by Dr Chaudhuri, CINI developed deep understanding of the social, economic and political underpinnings of malnutrition...

-Livemint.com China’s example shows the benefits of the rural workforce shifting from the farm to the non-farm sector The government announced its ambitious dream of doubling farmers’ income by 2022-23 in 2015-16. Incomes would have to grow annually by 10.4% to double in seven years. The data on growth rates of farm income given by NITI Aayog in its policy paper on doubling farmers’ income shows that the real income of farmers has...

-The Hindu Why measuring inequality is not the same as measuring changes in the level of poverty in India In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion on increasing inequality within several countries of the world, including India, particularly after the publication of Thomas Piketty’s book on inequality. It is true that rising inequality has adverse economic and social consequences. The Gini coefficient or other measures of inequality are being...