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,...

The World Economic Outlook – a bi-annual publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- released in October 2020 has anticipated that the economic progress made by the countries since the 1990s to reduce poverty would be turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, economic disparity would rise too in the post-COVID world because the crisis has disproportionately impacted women, informal sector workers and people with...

-Newsclick.in The government must analyse its existing data collection exercises, rationalise them and improve the inefficient statistical administration. It is good news that the Labour Bureau will revive its establishments-based Quarterly Employment Surveys or QES, using a larger sample. Since the Periodic Labour Force Surveys or PLFS collects data from households, the proposed quarterly survey of jobs will collect data from establishments. But it is advisable to review the multiple existing employment...

-Newsclick.in The global study, published by BMC Public Health, revealed that about 44% of the worldwide farming population (total 860 million) are poisoned by pesticides every year. In a comprehensive study published on Monday, December 8, scientists estimated that about 385 million people, particularly among farmers and agriculture workers, are poisoned by pesticides every year including 11,000 deaths per year. Among the fatalities, nearly 60% or 6,600 deaths per year occur in...

-IndiaSpend.com Bengaluru and Delhi: India’s national nutrition-specific programmes reach various social groups nearly equally, data show, and differences between uptake and delivery for all groups are small too. Yet more people from Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste communities remain undernourished, as successive National Family Health Surveys have shown. During the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the link between social identities and access to health services has been well documented in the United States and...