-Economic and Political Weekly The mid-day meal programme was introduced to mitigate social inequalities inherited through the hierarchical division of society, or what is called "resilience of social structures". This structural discrimination directly impedes equal access to benefits of development by excluding the poor and marginalised. A study of the MDM programme in rural Rajasthan probes this aspect of the "resilience of social structure". In particular, the article asks under what...

-The Hindu The recent launch of the first Dalit venture fund occasions an examination of the moral and ethical emptiness of capitalism History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics B.R. Ambedkar If only Milind Kamble, founder of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI) and Chandra Bhan Prasad, Dalit thinker, columnist and DICCI mentor, had imbibed the wisdom of Manning Marable's How Capitalism Underdeveloped...

-The Business Standard About 35 mn poor families may get benefits from the scheme which has the highest malnutrition rate in India Bhopal: Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan sounded the poll bugle on April 22 by announcing the availability of wheat at Re 1 a kg and rice at Rs 2 a kg to poor families from June 1. About 35 million poor families are expected to get benefits from the scheme...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The doctors at a private hospital recently diagnosed a 23-day-old child with life-threatening 'blue baby syndrome' caused by consumption of contaminated water. They found that the baby, from Dhamori Khurd village in Gautam Budh Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh, was being fed packaged formula milk mixed in water from the borewell, which had high nitrate content, as clean drinking water was not available. "When the baby came...

-The Business Standard Chhattisgarh proves no cash transfer or UID is needed to make PDS work Viewed from a ration shop in Surguja in the largely poor tribal north of Chhattisgarh, the arguments for and against the food security Bill seem way off the mark. We had travelled there to see first-hand Chhattisgarh's much-celebrated transformation of its broken, corrupt public distribution system (a recent survey found that wastage of PDS grain dropped...