School meals ensure nutrition for millions of vulnerable children across the world. Almost 370 million children worldwide are covered by school feeding programmes. While 100 million school children benefitted from the noon meal scheme in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Brazil (48 million), China (44 million), South Africa (9 million) and Nigeria (9 million) too run similar programmes for school children. However, an estimated 39 billion in-school...

-The Hindu Study highlights the socio-economic impact of accidents There are more fatalities from road crashes among poor families rather than the rich shows a new World Bank study that highlights the socio-economic impact of road accidents — from access to post-accident medical care to coping with the financial distress caused by a mishap. In the study, low income households reported twice the numbers of deaths post-crash vis-à-vis high income households. The risk...

-Down to Earth The number of pandemic-induced new poor is forecast to rise to 143-163 million in 2021 The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, which forced economies around the world to lock down last year, may have increased global poverty by 119 million-124 million, according to updated estimates by World Bank. This includes the 31 million people who would have moved out of poverty (measured at the international poverty line of $1.90, or...

Commenting on the recently released fifth round of National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data for 17 states and five Union Territories (UTs) in an article published in The Indian Express (dated 6th January, 2021), Arvind Subramanian and his co-authors have stated that India has made progress on certain outcomes, including infant mortality rate (IMR), under-five mortality rate (U5MR) and neonatal mortality rate (NNMR). Relying on various rounds of NFHS data,...

-Down to Earth This weak link between growth in income and nutritional outcomes requires the attention of policy makers The Covid pandemic reminds us that we may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. Low-income countries like India faced a multi-pronged crisis during the pandemic — containing the infections while being home to 195.9 million of the 821 million undernourished people in the world. Prevalence of undernourishment in India...