-Deccan Chronicle Encephalopathy is a disease in which the functioning of the brain is affected. Whose children go to bed hungry? In a country with glaring social and economic disparities, hunger is a deeply political issue which many would like to dodge. But that is at the heart of the big story about the recent child deaths in Muzaffarpur, Bihar’s litchi growing belt. At the time of writing, more than 100 children are...

-The Hindu The new GDP series has some methodological and sampling problems Former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian recently claimed in a paper that India’s GDP growth from 2011-12 to 2016-17 was likely to have been overestimated. The Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council has rejected this claim, stating that his paper would “not stand the scrutiny of academic or policy research standards”. In a conversation moderated by T.C.A. Sharad Raghavan, Pronab Sen...

-Newsclick.in The draft National Education Policy reinforces outdated ideas about the goals of a foundational literacy programme Many children in elementary classrooms across India cannot read and write proficiently, as demonstrated on an annual basis by the Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER). This affects other school-based learning, as well as functioning in societies and economies that prize literacy. Capabilities of young children It was heartening, therefore, to see a chapter devoted to “Foundational...

-Newsclick.in Like always, several myths are being propagated like – the irrelevance of economic issues or the supremacy of nationalism. But what is the truth? Like all elections everywhere in the world, India’s general election this year too has created its own mythology. Some of it was – understandably – created during the election campaign while some have been generated after the results were out and the BJP-led alliance emerged as a...

-TheNewsMinute.com Set up in 2017, Kisan Mitra provides counselling to distressed farmers and acts as a bridge between them and the government. “It was during the 2018 floods that we got a call from a farmer in Adilabad. The caller didn’t need any help for himself but said that his neighbour has been sitting in a corner of his field since morning with a bottle of pesticide in his hand. The...