-News18.com Multiple government schools in Saharanpur have accepted the practice of children from minority communities cleaning school premises and toilets, while the upper caste students look on. Saharanpur: Semi-urban and rural India have perennial issues that their urban counterparts choose to ignore. Caste discrimination is one such issue that becomes evident when one crosses over to villages bordering Saharanpur district in Uttar Pradesh. Brijesh Devi, one of the rare scheduled caste principals, is...

-The Hindu Malnutrition is a complex problem and results from not getting enough food to not getting the right kind of food, says the United Nations WFP (India) Country Director Even with the world's largest subsidised food distribution systems serving 65 million poor families across the country, India continues to be home to a quarter of all malnourished people worldwide. In view of the incredible challenge of improving nutrition for all people...

-Livemint.com Data shows India’s sex ratio worsening, no clear picture of improvement in districts under the Beti Bachao scheme New Delhi: When Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose Jhunjhunu district in Rajasthan to announce the nationwide expansion of the government’s flagship Beti Bachao scheme on Thursday, the choice held a lot of symbolic import. Jhunjhunu, part of the initial 100 districts chosen for a targeted launch of the scheme in early 2015, has catapulted...

-The Hindu Considered a ‘cousin’ of Madhubani Mithila, but perhaps closer to Bengal’s Kantha work On a late winter morning a group of women — Pinki Devi, Khusbu, Chanchala, Sunita, Nutan and Bhibha Devi among them — sit on a large, grimy, black tarpaulin sheet in the part-shadow of a slouching tree in Bhusra village in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district. In their hands are colourful fabrics on which are emerging stories told through chain...

-Hindustan Times Increasing rates of girls’ education, proactive government investments in adolescent girls, and strong public messaging around the illegality of child marriage and the harm it causes attributed to the shift. From one in four to approximately one in five, child marriages have seen a decline world over in the past 10 years, a Unicef report released on Monday said. The proportion of women who were married as children decreased by 15%...