-Financial Express It focused on the effect of food prices on child nutrition in the Andhra Pradesh, one of India’s largest states, using data from the Young Lives project based at Oxford University An international study, conducted by researchers from the Public Health Foundation of India and the University of Oxford, with a team from Stanford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says spikes in food prices during...

-The Indian Express The Rural Development Ministry has washed its hands of the matter while the RGI too seems reluctant to claim ownership. Amid growing demands to release the caste figures compiled as part of the Socio Economic and Caste Census, various government authorities having been passing the buck to one another. Officials have been saying the caste data, compiled from the first such census since 1931, is part of a...

-Hindustan Times When right to information activist Guru Prasad Shukla was beaten to death by fellow villagers last month, he became the 39th person to lay down his life for exercising the transparency law in its first decade. Another 275 people have reportedly been assaulted or harassed for invoking the law to raise uncomfortable questions before those in power. The 50-year-old Shukla had sought information about development work in his village and...

-TheWire.in   The newly released UNESCO e-atlas on out-of-school children (OOSC) provides worrying evidence not only of the low priority being accorded to basic education across developing countries, but also by the developed world in terms of the aid given to education. As many as 124 million children and adolescents worldwide are out of school, 17.7 million – or 14 per cent – of whom are Indian. The rise in the number...

There is some positive news about national progress in sanitation and drinking water. A newly released report from UNICEF and WHO informs us that the country has witnessed 31 percent reduction in open defecation since 1990. This means 394 million Indians no more defecate in the open. The bad news, however, is that the progress in ‘population not practising open defecation’ among the poorest has been slower during the last 20...