-Hind Kisan In the hill state, only 16 percent of the cooks working under the school meal programme are Dalits. This is an appalling figure in a state where they make one-fourth of the population. Caste is a stronger divider in this picturesque Himachali village of Saraha than the river which cuts across dividing it into two halves. The west bank hosts mostly Dalit houses and the upper castes have occupied...

-The Hindu Business Line Asks ministry to define stand on Aadhaar-linkage, cash transfers New Delhi: Coming close on the heels of a 11-year-old girl reportedly dying in Jharkhand as her family did not possess Aadhar cards for rations, the All India Federation of Anganwadi Workers and Helpers Federation said that in many States such as West Bengal, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, departments were directing Anganwadi workers to link the beneficiaries’ Aadhaar...

-Frontline.in In the latest Global Hunger Index, India is bracketed in the category of countries where hunger levels are “serious”. But the policy responses on hunger and malnutrition in the country have been inadequate and faulty. In the second week of October, a few media reports in India highlighted significant data pertaining to global hunger. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) had released its Global Hunger Index (GHI), rating 118...

-The Hindu India must convert its young population to a competitive advantage, and nutrition and health are foundational to that outcome. The “Global Nutrition Report 2016” once again demonstrates India’s slow overall progress in addressing chronic malnutrition, manifest in stunting (low weight for age), wasting (low weight for height), micronutrient deficiencies and over-weight. Our track record in reducing the proportion of undernourished children over the past decade has been modest at best,...

-The Indian Express The budget recognises the crisis in rural India, but allocations do not match the talk In India now, there appears to be an inverse relationship between the time finance ministers spend talking about a particular issue in their budget speeches and the amount of money they actually allocate to deal with it. This was true of former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s budget speeches, but incumbent FM Arun Jaitley...