-The Hindu ‘But it still remains home to one quarter of global underfed population’ India has halved its incidence of extreme poverty, from 49.4 per cent in 1994 to 24.7 per cent in 2011, ahead of the 2015 deadline set by the U.N,, shows the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Report, 2015, released on Tuesday. The report set the limit for extreme poverty as those living on $1.25 or less a day. The reduction...

-PTI India has made “impressive” progress in providing primary education to its children but it is still struggling to achieve similar results in lower secondary education and has the largest number of out-of-school adolescents, a UN study said today. According to the study by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the Education for All Global Monitoring Report (EFR GMR), 124 million children and adolescents are now out of school...

-The Hindu If Maharashtra is trying to identify children who are not getting educated, as per RTE, it has to include those children who are not studying the core subjects, be they in a madrasa, Vedic pathshala or any other religious or community school Maharashtra’s recent decision to conduct a survey of what it calls “non-school going children” seems to have created a storm. Political parties are now up in arms calling...

-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...