Adding to the debate over celebrity economists blaming India’s malnutrition and stunting vis-à-vis Sub Saharan Africa on genetic differences, Dean Spears, a public health expert and a visiting fellow at Delhi School of Economics, offers evidence connecting our poor sanitation and open defecation with high morbidity and malnutrition. (see both links below). In an evidence-based paper titled Policy Lessons from Implementing India’s Total Sanitation Campaign (2012), based on the review...

-The Times of India SAMBALPUR/BHUBANESWAR: Wails of bereaved mothers filled the wards and corridors of VSS medical College and Hospital on Saturday as nine babies died at the hospital in the past 22 hours. While hospital authorities attributed the deaths to a host of reasons, locals put the blame on long uncontrolled exposure to light therapy at the sick newborn care unit (SNCU). "The high number of deaths is shocking. But the...

-The Business Standard But many numbers point to contrary trends The latest numbers on poverty levels are dramatic; they show that the number of people below the poverty line (as defined by the late economist Suresh Tendulkar) has shrunk from 37 per cent of the population to 22 per cent, in the seven years to 2011-12. This is an unprecedented rate of fall in poverty levels; some 40 per cent of those...

-The Guardian Half of Indians have no toilet. It's one of many gigantic failures that have prompted Nobel prize-winning academic Amartya Sen to write a devastating critique of India's economic boom The roses are blooming at the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings. There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction...

Just when the country is getting ready to expand the Right to Food for all, the recent deaths of school children in two districts of Bihar (Chhapra and Madhubani) have raised many uncomfortable question about our standards of cleanliness, sanitation and hygiene in and around the kitchens being run under the Mid Day Meal Scheme (MDMS). These, and many more anomalies, have been brought out by a recent report titled...