-Frontline The Central government's proposal to hand over the supply of supplementary nutrition to NGOs in the name of "community participation" is surely an invitation for private profiteering on the back of this supposedly public scheme. ENSURING safe and healthy conditions for the reproduction of the population is obviously the most fundamental requirement of any society. So the progress of a society can be determined (and indeed is routinely judged) by the...

-The Hindu Every hour 25 women fall victim to crimes; 11 suffer cruelty by husbands and other relatives; three are raped; and there is one dowry death. Horrific crimes against women have, in fact, continued unabated. What is worse is that there has been an acceleration of such crimes in recent years, with the annual rate rising from 5.9 per cent in 2006 to 7.8 per cent during 2006-2011. Cases of domestic...

-Live Mint Some commentators dismiss the seriousness of India's nutritional crisis as it fails to account for genetic differences With one in two children malnourished in India, child malnutrition is considered to be among the biggest challenges facing the country. But are these figures highly exaggerated? The answer is a resounding yes, according to Columbia University economist Arvind Panagariya, who believes that the international standards used to measure nutritional attainments of...

-The Economic Times Arvind Panagariya, a professor of Indian economics at Columbia University, hits out at Nobel laureate and Harvard University professor Amartya Sen over his call to confront MPs with the "number of deaths" a delayed Food Security Bill can cause. The former chief economist at the Asian Development Bank counters Sen's argument that it is high social spending that has contributed to the economic growth of Asian economies such...

-Down to Earth The country's 76 million poor have been denied the right to claim subsidised foodgrain under public distribution system The government has denied 76 million people in the country eligible to access public distribution system (PDS) the benefits of the food security system. For the past 20 years, the government has not cared to refresh its data and has been distributing foodgrain according to the population figure of 1991. Worse, the...