-Hindustan Times About 50 km south of Ranchi, in Khunti district, a narrow dirt road leads to Ganloya village. Makeshift shops selling tobacco and mobile recharge cards are interspersed with thatched huts and tamarind trees in the hamlet of Panna Lal Mahto, allegedly one of India’s biggest human traffickers. Despite the scorching heat, girls play barefoot in a clearing by a rice field. Nearby, a group of men sitting on a charpoy drink...

-Hindustan Times The Cabinet on Wednesday took two decisions that focus on rural India: First, it approved an additional 50 days of work for farmers/workers under the MGNREGS over and above the 100 days in areas where drought or natural calamities have been notified; and, second, it okayed a plan to develop a cluster of ‘smart villages’ to transform rural areas to economically, socially and physically sustainable spaces. The two decisions...

-The New Indian Express The recent socio-economic and caste census (SECC) 2011 data on deprivations is profoundly disquieting. At the global level too, the latest data on economic inequality is equally disconcerting. That 75 per cent of rural households in India earn less than Rs 5,000 per month or around Rs 33 per capita per day and that over 40 per cent are landless and work as manual casual labourers even...

-The Times of India LONDON: India is the world's antibiotic popping capital, recording the highest number of such pills consumed annually — 13 billion pills as against 10 billion in China and 7 billion in the US. As a result of such reckless use, deadly strains of life-taking bacteria that are resistant to even the latest generation of antibiotics have been found to be rampant in India. The first State of the World's...

-The Indian Express It requires a far wider spectrum of interventions than mere clinical management. The latest edition of the Global Nutrition Report 2015 by the International Food Policy Research Institute, released on Tuesday, brings back the concerns over malnutrition into sharp focus. In July, the government of India, after much avoidable controversy, released malnutrition (used synonymously as undernutrition) figures from the Rapid Survey on Children (RSoC) data that was collected...