-Down to Earth Our policy makers should move away from the income criterion for estimating poverty and take cognisance of other indicators Amid mounting criticism and heated debates about the poverty line, a challenge has resurfaced to examine whether there could be a single non-monetary criterion of estimating poverty. A poverty line is a monetary cut-off point below which a person is deemed to be poor. Thus, any attempt to measure poverty...

-The Hindu Health activists demand public disclosure of maternal death reviews and the remedial action taken Twenty-two-year-old Kousalya (name changed), a Scheduled Caste woman in a remote village in Karnataka, was in an abusive marriage. She had suffered a late miscarriage in her first pregnancy and had been very careful with seeking antenatal care early in this pregnancy. She had moderate anaemia which was not identified or treated at the taluka hospital....

-The Hindu Acting on Sonia's recommendations, government to bring in key official amendments to Food Security Bill The government has decided to bring in key amendments to the National Food Security Bill, removing provisions for cash transfer and role of contractors and manufacturers in the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). The decision, which came on the recommendation of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, found support from the Opposition. The move comes even as the...

-The Hindu Overcoming son preference in India remains a daunting challenge as even educated women are prone to it Have women fared better than men, and girls better than boys in the last decade or so? In the din over a dramatic reduction in poverty in the period 2009/10-2011/12 that is unlikely to die down, deep questions about the discrimination and deprivation that women face from the womb to the rest of...

-Economic and Political Weekly In his article Arvind Panagariya argues that (a) the prevailing narrative of child malNutrition being worse in India "than nearly all Sub-Saharan African countries with lower per capita incomes" is false, (b) that this notion is an "artefact of a faulty methodology", and (c) that the Nutrition situation and recent trends in India are not so bad anyway. Please click here to read the entire article. ...