-Hindustan Times A nutrition plan within the National Food Security Act meant for pregnant women and lactating mothers, a vulnerable group that skews India’s hunger indices, looks quietly buried. It still runs as a trial in 52 districts, two years after the landmark legislation was signed into law. The Centre hasn’t yet begun budgeting for it to expand the maternal health scheme to cover the whole country. While a parallel scheme under...

-Frontline Odisha shows the way in the implementation of the ICDS scheme to ensure that children receive nutrition and care in their earliest years, but the Centre’s moves to slash budgetary allocations could wreak havoc on such programmes. At the Tasarda anganwadi centre in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district, as the auxiliary nurse and midwife (ANM) pulled out the blood pressure (BP) instrument to check a pregnant woman, the children at the anganwadi began...

-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...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Manik Garg, second-year commerce student at Shri Ram College of Commerce, knows nearly as much about cattle and dairy-farming as he does about business. He knows, for instance, that there are three types of feed ("Green fodder, hay and high-nutrition feed"), that a high-yielding animal (delivering at least 15 litres of milk per day) costs Rs 60,000—70,000 and that some pedigreed bovines need air-conditioned rooms. He,...

-FirstPost.com The last time a comprehensive study was published on nutrition or health in India, it was back in 2007. Another study was done in 2013 and 2014 by Unicef, the UN agency for children, in collaboration with the Indian government. But the results of the study, which were to be published in October 2014, never saw light of day. At least, not in their entirety. A limited set of data on...