India seems to have arrived at the threshold of polio eradication, but should it lower its guard? ON January 13, India achieved what had only two years ago seemed impossible in the immediate term. The country, which, given the epidemiological data in the new millennium, had come to be regarded by health experts around the world as one that would be the last to achieve freedom from polio (poliomyelitis), recorded no...

Civil rights groups blame packaged food supplied to anganwadis  Close on the heels of the damning hunger and malnutrition (HUNGaMA) report, which found 42 per cent children below age five across India underweight and 59 per cent children stunted,  comes another report on the state of nutrition among children in Karnataka state. Over 1.2 million children in the state in the age group of 0-6 years are malnourished and underweight, says a...

-PTI Falling prices of vegetables such as potatoes and onions pushed down the food price index by 0.42 per cent in the week ended January 7, over the same period of the previous year. However, experts feel that the decline in prices of food articles will not be enough to prompt the Reserve Bank of India to cut key interest rates at its forthcoming monetary policy review on January 24. Food inflation as...

With 21% of its population undernourished, nearly 44% of under-5 children underweight and 7% of them dying before they reach five years, India is firmly established among the world's most hunger-ridden countries. The situation is better than only Congo, Chad, Ethiopia or Burundi, but it is worse than Sudan, North Korea, Pakistan or Nepal. This is according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) which combines the above three indicators...

While one year has passed without polio caused by natural poliovirus, we can claim complete eradication only after we ensure the absence of wild and vaccine polioviruses in the population. Today, India passes one whole year without polio caused by natural (wild) poliovirus — a major milestone towards polio eradication. This spells relief from an agonising decade of wild polioviruses refusing to surrender. Many experts believed that India posed the greatest...