Many Indians eat poorly. Would a “right to food” help? “LOOK at this muck,” says 35-year-old Pamlesh Yadav, holding up a tin-plate of bilious-yellow grains, a mixture of wheat, rice and mung beans. “It literally sticks in the throat. The children won’t eat it, so we take it home and feed it to the cows.” Mrs Yadav has brought her children to a state-run nursery in Bhindusi village in rural Rajasthan. The...

The World Bank has approved $150 million in loan for India to accelerate implementation of its National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), which is aimed at transforming the service delivery system across the country. While this World Bank loan will not target specific services per se, it will initiate policy and institutional actions that will impact all the services. The loan will support NeGP - approved in May 2006 as a national programme -...

Food security should be used as an indicator of vulnerability to climate change Staple food varieties better adapted to future climatic conditions must be developed “Potentially catastrophic” impacts on food production from slow-onset climate changes are expected to increasingly hit the developing world in the future, and action is required now to prepare for those impacts, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned on Thursday in a report to the United Nations...

Leprosy has officially been eliminated in India, yet 130,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. Richard Cookson and Seyi Rhodes report on the plight of the patients shunned by society Narsappa was just 10 years old when he was told he had leprosy, but the news changed the course of his life forever. People in his Indian village immediately began to shun him and told his parents that he had to...

The Prime Minister's focus on double-digit growth is not due to any ‘growth mania'. It is for the benefit of the poor. At a recent function for police officers, the Prime Minister observed: “If we don't control Naxalism, we have to say goodbye to our country's ambition to sustain a growth rate of 10 to 11 per cent per annum.” Some commentators (like Prof Prabhat Patnaik of JNU) interpret this (in a...