700 million Indians have cell phones, but 638 million still don’t have access to proper sanitation. At this year’s South Asian Conference on Sanitation, social solutions to the problem were discussed, including “naming and shaming” and the CLTS programme which gets villagers to map the open areas where they defecate There can hardly be a bigger taboo than sanitation when it comes to the government, bureaucracy or even the people...

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...

This article documents and then examines the various benefits that, it is claimed, will flow from linking the Unique Identity number with the public distribution system and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. It filters the unfounded claims, which arise from a poor understanding of how the PDS and NREGS function, from the genuine ones. On the latter, there are several demanding conditions that need to be met in order...

Girl child survival is skewedeven in those areas of northern India having limited access topublic health facilities and modern ultrasound technology asfamilies ''neglect'' them to ensure there are few survivors,says a new study. Since families can not know the sex of the foetus dueto lack of technology, girls born in these areas facesystematic healthcare neglect, specially in poorer communitiesto ''dispose them off'', says the study. Allowing the umbilical cord of the newly...

Fundamentally, our current crisis in food supplies as well as food prices arises out of the sidelining of Jawahar Lal Nehru’s dictum “everything else can wait but not agriculture”. Unfortunately, the last twenty years have been characterised by very low rates of agricultural growth, averaging around one percent per annum. This is almost equal to the rate of GDP growth during the last half century of British rule. In effect, in...