-Livemint.com The government should put greater emphasis on behaviour change than construction of toilets In 2014, more than half of India’s population still practised open defecation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi set his government the goal of making the country open defecation-free in five years, by the 150th anniversary of M.K. Gandhi’s birthday in 2019, by launching the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA). Three years later, we are more than halfway into that period,...

-The Indian Express The move came about, the letter mentions, during a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on August 25, 2017, where it was found that proof of pending recommendations being implemented was present only on paper. Mumbai: The Union Home Ministry has written to police forces across the country to assess their efforts to encourage citizens to move to cashless transactions and curb fake currency and...

-TheWire.in The government is finalising a pilot project in line with NITI Aayog’s recent suggestion that children and mothers be given cash transfers instead of cooked or uncooked food. At a conference on under-nutrition organised by the Ministry of Women and Child Development this week, Union minister Maneka Gandhi said that the government is keen to overhaul the Integrated Child Development Service (ICDS) and withdraw the provisions of cooked food and rations...

-Livemint.com The trajectory of wealth concentration in the country, not just the levels of recently estimated inequality, is important A flurry of estimates regarding Indian inequality have captured public interest recently. Whether one believes the wealth inequality numbers presented by Credit Suisse or the distributional income accounts by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, evidence seems to state that India has high economic disparities. But inequality is to be expected in a developing...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Women and Child Development ministry has written to all states and union territories that there isn't enough evidence to support the use of Ready-to-Use-Therapeutic foods (RUTF) for the management of severe acute malnutrition (SAM). This is a blow to the multi-crore complex of international NGOs who push packaged food as a strategy to address severe malnutrition and companies that produce them. The WCD letter pointed...