-The Hindu   Convention suggests steps to combat Malnutrition   The second “national convention on children's right to food” concluded here on Sunday with a call to link anti-Malnutrition strategies to inflationary indices. The three-day convention in which about 1,000 delegates from 21 States participated, adopted a 25-point “charter” on combating Malnutrition. Shanta Sinha, chairperson of the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), stressed on focussing on the disadvantaged sections in the...

India's economic growth has added over seven million new jobs every year for almost a quarter of a century. Workers have seen their wages - adjusted for prices - rise by nearly 3% a year. Poverty rates among wage workers and the self-employed have fallen. Going forward, with swelling numbers of new entrants - and more women entering the job market , as was the case during east Asia's rapid...

Calling for urgent measures to provide sanitation facility across the country, Union Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh has pointed to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that in addition to Malnutrition another distressing national shame which India can't live with is open defecation. Mr. Ramesh, who also controls the Department of Drinking Water Supply which implements sanitation programme, has written a letter to the Prime Minister urging him to change the government's...

-The Hindu   Suggest “necessary preventive” measures to safeguard the interest of workers   Trade union groups on Monday pitched for a worker-oriented Budget for 2012-13 aimed at removing poverty and unemployment and suggested “necessary preventive” measures to safeguard the interests of workers. At their meeting here with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee — the second in the series of the customary pre-Budget consultations — representatives of trade unions (TUs) proposed that wages of contract labour...

With 21% of its population undernourished, nearly 44% of under-5 children underweight and 7% of them dying before they reach five years, India is firmly established among the world's most hunger-ridden countries. The situation is better than only Congo, Chad, Ethiopia or Burundi, but it is worse than Sudan, North Korea, Pakistan or Nepal. This is according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) which combines the above three indicators...