-The Hindu India's paradox of fast economic growth across several years and chronic malnutrition in a significant section of the population is well known. It has vast numbers of stunted children whose nutritional status is so poor that infectious diseases increase the danger of death. About 34 per cent of girls aged 15 to 19 are stunted in the country, according to a major review of global undernutrition by The...

-The United Nations New figures today from the United Nations educational agency show that the number of children out of school dipped slightly last year over 2011. Fifty-seven million children were out of school in 2011, according to the UN Scientific, Educational and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics, down just two million from the previous year. The agency also points out that the challenge of getting more children into school is being...

-The Times of India In the decade or so that i was at the Planning Commission, i always had advisory responsibility for the food ministry/public distribution system, among other issues of development policy. It did not take very long to find out that the fundamental problem with the system was about so-called "leakages" abetted by corruption: One soon learnt that the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was one of the most...

-Reuters LONDON: Some 165 million children worldwide are stunted by malnutrition as babies and face a future of ill health, poor education, low earnings and poverty, the head of the United Nations children's fund said on Friday. Anthony Lake, executive director of Unicef, told Reuters the problem of malnutrition is vastly under-appreciated, largely because poor nutrition is often mistaken for a lack of food. In reality, he said, malnutrition and its irreversible health...

-The Hindu     There is little demonstrated evidence of health benefits from access to ‘improved' stoves and clean fuels Around three billion of the world's poorest people have to burn firewood, animal dung, crop waste and coal to cook food and heat homes, using traditional stoves and open fires. The health-damaging smoke that results is estimated to cause some four million premature deaths each year, principally of women and children. Although many governments, multinational...