Independent India's greatest failing must be its inability to feed its people. With 42 per cent of all children malnourished, 56 per cent of women anaemic, and the country ranked 65th out of 84 countries on the Global Hunger Index, the report card of the state on nutrition must have an F. Most disturbing is the fact that things have got worse over time. In the first half of the...
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Tackling hunger by Purnima S Tripathy
The NAC suggests steps to ensure food security, but its recommendation for ‘selective universalisation' of the PDS is criticised. INDIA is home to some 230 million undernourished people – that is, 27 per cent of all undernourished people in the world. Worse still, more than half of all child deaths in India are because of malnutrition, and over 1.5 million children in the country are at the risk of being malnourished...
More »Oliver Twist seeks food security by P Sainath
The NREGS is restricted. The PDS is targeted. Only exploitation is universal. The rotting of lakhs of tonnes of foodgrain in open yards, while shocking, is hardly new or surprising. Remember the rural poor marching on godowns in Andhra Pradesh in 2001 in similar circumstances? The Supreme Court was quite right in jolting the Union government. “In a country where admittedly people are starving, it is a crime to waste even...
More »Govt Survey Confirms Dismal Educational Quality
Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) is world’s most extensive primary education programme, but is it working? The grim reality that India’s Right to Education is at best working in terms of quantity of schools, and certainly not in terms of quality of education, was first proved in successive Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER), brought out by education NGO ‘Pratham’ through nationwide ground-level surveys. Now a Planning Commission evaluation report confirms most...
More »Over 9,000 RTE complaints in Delhi
Over 9,000 complaints - ranging from denial of admission in various city schools to flouting of the Right to Education Act by the institutes - have flooded Delhi's child rights body. According to Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights' (DCPCR) chairperson Amod Kanth, the body has already disposed of around 1,000 such complaints but around 8,000 of them are still pending before the body's special RTE cell. The RTE act came...
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