-The Business Standard The mid-day meal scheme cannot be blamed for the Chapra incident. It is a question of professionalising the administration and everyone doing his duty. N C Saxena, Food Commissioner appointed by the Supreme Court in the Right to Food case tells Sreelatha Menon.Edited excerpts: * Can the mid-day meal tragedy in Chapra be blamed on the decision to have separate kitchens for each school without a monitoring mechanism? The monitoring...

-Outlook Social indices topper Kerala just can't stop the baby deaths in its malnutrition-hit tribal Attapady belt Under the thick canopy of a peepal tree, beside the road that winds to Pallur Ooru in Attapady in the Western Ghats, is a small tribal burial ground. There are no tombstones to mark the graves and on closer look one sees tiny mounds where the mud has been disturbed. In a quiet corner,...

-The Hindu Social audits of the mid-day meal scheme by parents can ensure that the world's largest intervention against hunger that also helps keep children in school need not suffer setbacks like the Bihar tragedy This week, 23 children lost their lives after having a mid-day meal served at a school in Bihar's Saran district. Preliminary reports suggest that the school lacked a storage facility for foodgrain which led to contamination and...

-The Indian Express Just a few days back, the Bihar Human Resource Development department was gloating over having extended the mid-day meal scheme to 591 more schools across Bihar. Two days after the worst tragedy to have hit what is India's flagship education scheme and the world's largest school nutrition programme, the department finds itself at a loss for words. While the Centre Thursday decided to constitute a monitoring committee to look...

-Feministsindia.com Sharmila Rege, an extremely popular teacher and warm fellow traveler in the women's studies movement, will always be with us through her writings on caste, gender and feminism and compassion she has shown for activists and researchers I was shocked and saddened to learn about the untimely death of Sharmila Rege, on 13 July, 2013, due to cancer of colon, at the young age of 48. Prof. Sharmila Rege was an...