-The Indian Express Delhi lost the window of opportunity to avoid an outbreak because of a governance deficit; first because the state was in election mode and then because of the AAP’s internal squabbles. The past few weeks have witnessed substantial media coverage on the dengue outbreak in Delhi. Heartrending stories of clearly avoidable deaths gave the crisis a human face. Focusing on Delhi, most sought to expose the lack of...

-Livemint.com There is a need to evaluate whether implementing a cash transfer programme has become the end On 4 September, the ministry of women and child development (MWCD) was issued a notice by the Supreme Court questioning its failure to implement the maternal cash entitlement guaranteed in the National Food Security Act, 2013 (NFSA). Section 4 of the NFSA entitles all pregnant and lactating women to Rs. 6,000, if they are...

-The Indian Express It requires a far wider spectrum of interventions than mere clinical management. The latest edition of the Global Nutrition Report 2015 by the International Food Policy Research Institute, released on Tuesday, brings back the concerns over malnutrition into sharp focus. In July, the government of India, after much avoidable controversy, released malnutrition (used synonymously as undernutrition) figures from the Rapid Survey on Children (RSoC) data that was collected...

-The Hindu Rescuing Maternal and Child Health-only systems, which have become under-resourced and have built a very high-cost but low-performance culture, will be a challenging task. Given the rising burden of non-communicable diseases, there is an increasing demand to build health systems that can address these concerns. However, given how large the unfinished agenda of the Millennium Development Goals is, the Indian government has chosen to stay focussed on Maternal and Child...

-Economic and Political Weekly After coming to power in 2014, the National Democratic Alliance government took several measures to dilute the pro-poor provisions of the Land Acquisition Act of 2013. Though it has backed down, several questions remain over the way the Modi government has dealt with the issue of land acquisition. Santosh Verma (santosh.econ@gmail.com) is at the Council for Social Development, New Delhi. Land acquisition—by private corporations or the state—has raised vital...