-The Telegraph New Delhi: For 10 months, the Narendra Modi administration withheld from the public the findings of a study by India's government and UNICEF that charts "unprecedented" improvement in child malnutrition over the past decade but shows Gujarat in an unflattering light. Under pressure after The Economist reported the findings a fortnight ago, the government last week released the national-level data from the Rapid Survey on Children. But it is still...

-Newsclick.in Mired by controversies and scandals, the NDA Government has now secured another rare achievement. Recent disclosures, first reported in the ‘Economist’ magazine, indicate that the government has taken great pains to suppress a survey on child health, conducted by the UNICEF, in collaboration with the Government of India. The Rapid Survey on Children (RSOC) was commissioned by the UPA Government and covers the period between 2013 and 2014. Normally the survey...

There is some positive news about national progress in sanitation and drinking water. A newly released report from UNICEF and WHO informs us that the country has witnessed 31 percent reduction in open defecation since 1990. This means 394 million Indians no more defecate in the open. The bad news, however, is that the progress in ‘population not practising open defecation’ among the poorest has been slower during the last 20...

-The Hindu National averages hide State-level dynamics; SCs, STs worse off on average. New data from the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011 and the UNICEF’s Rapid Survey on Children (RSOC) show that while India’s Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have worse socio-economic indicators, this disadvantage is varies substantially depending on the State where they live. So SC and ST children in Tamil Nadu and Kerala are less likely to be underweight...

-PTI New Delhi: Under fire for holding back state- wise findings of UNICEF's Rapid Survey on Children, the Women and Child Development Ministry has constituted a committee to examine the report following differences of opinion over the survey methodology. The committee, which is likely to submit its report within a week, includes officials from the ministries of Health and Family Welfare, and Statistics and Programme Implementation. It will work upon to reach...