-Live Mint   As United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi prepares to intervene next week in the great national debate about who is poor, she might want to visit north-eastern Mumbai to see how the poorest are not even classified as such and how a giant government scheme to save their children from malnutrition is failing. The nauseating stench from a mountain of garbage greets a visitor to Rafi Nagar at the base...

As a national debate rages over the Indian poverty line, in the heart of Bandra, one of Mumbai’s richest suburbs, in a shanty with barely enough standing space for two adults, three-year-old Priya Doiphode, clad in a red tee shirt, lies listless on a string bed. Priya is one of the 83,243 children in Mumbai who are malnourished, according to government data, a statistic that makes Mumbai the most malnourished...

Lags behind Bangladesh and Pakistan in assessment and updating data While the Centre is projecting a concern for the poor and the hungry through its proposed national Food Security Bill, it has not even updated data on under-nutrition and hunger in the last six years. This has prevented international bodies such as the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) from assessing the improvement, or lack of it, in India in terms of...

-The Times of India   India's food security situation continues to rank as "alarming" according to the International Food Policy Research Institute'sGlobal Hunger Index, 2011. It ranks 67 of the 81 countries of the world with the worst food security status. This means that there are only 14 countries in the world whose people have a worse nutritional status.  The GHI is composed of three equally weighted indicators - the proportion of the...

There are fears that curative health care will be left to the private sector, while the public system will handle preventive and low-quality care. AN issue of The Lancet earlier this year highlighted some of the problems with public health in India, acknowledging that “it is in crisis”. The robust economic growth over the past 20 years has not translated into better health indices; indeed the decline of infant and child...