-The Hindustan Times The recent release of The Lancet's special edition on Maternal and Child Nutrition in Delhi provided an occasion to debate the relevance of its recommendations for India. The discourse was enlivened by a statement, released ahead of the event by several Indian health experts, challenging the content and intent of some of the suggested interventions. Three authors of The Lancet series and many of the critics who issued that statement...

-The Hindu Indentured labour may be a forgotten part of our colonial economic history but Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh are still sending ‘Girmitya' to toil in distant lands The descendants of indentured labourers, who migrated from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to erstwhile colonies, recently met at The Hague in the Netherlands to commemorate 140 years of migration - perpetuated through a system popularly known as ‘Girmit.' They gathered from all...

-The Business Standard NAC shouldn't have seen growth as the enemy of welfare For the nine years of the United Progressive Alliance government, the National Advisory Council led by Sonia Gandhi and including many well-known people from the corporate and non-governmental organisation world - mostly those with a left-of-centre perspective - has been the focus of much attention. The conventional narrative is that the NAC represented Sonia Gandhi's socialist instincts, and regularly...

-The Hindu Aruna Roy's decision to terminate her relationship with the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council has returned the spotlight to the ideological divide within the ruling establishment on welfare spending. As the civil rights activist noted in her letter to the Congress president, the rupture came over the Manmohan Singh government's refusal to pay statutory minimum wages to workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act -...

-The Hindustan Times People in rural India too are killing their unborn daughters, pulling down the child sex ratio across the country to its lowest since 1961 but the general sex ratio has moved up 10 points to 943 females for 1000 males. The sex ratio in the 0-6 age group brings out the recent changes in the attitude and outlook towards the girl child and indicates the future trend of sex...