-Tehelka The NDA government’s move to open more Jan Aushadhi stores ignores the multitude of issues currently plaguing them Amidst the jostling crowd at the Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital in Shahdara, Delhi, is 68-year-old Suresh Chandra, holding his medical files on one hand and prescription letter on the other. Chandra, who is a lung disease patient, moves towards the Jan Aushadhi store, situated in the hospital premises. Chandra hopes that the government-run medical...

THE controversy over Maggi instant noodles has once again highlighted the issues plaguing food safety in India. Not only does the issue raise critical questions about safe food production by multinational companies such as Nestle but it also foregrounds the institutional fault lines when it comes to ensuring food safety. Frontline spoke to Sunita Narain, who heads the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), the organisation instrumental in initiating...

-The Indian Express Information was collected on a range of parameters at the individual and household levels like occupation, education, disability, religion, SC/ST status and employment. Nearly one in every three rural households still have an uncertain source of income and continue to live in one-room kutcha houses, according to the findings of the first national Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC). Officials told The Indian Express that these households — 31.26 per...

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...

-The Indian Express From NSSO data comes a key feature of vegetarianism: states that consume more milk go slow on egg, fish, meat. Being vegetarian means having a diet loaded with dal, sabzi and phal, right? Wrong — when it comes to India, at least. Average household monthly per capita expenditure (MPCE) on vegetables and fresh fruit is higher in fish- and beef-eating Kerala than in “vegetarian” Madhya Pradesh, whose Chief Minister...