-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has got a reluctant railways on board for its ambitious bill seeking a blanket ban on manual scavenging. The Prohibition of Empowerment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill, 2012, which was cleared last week by the cabinet, had been pending for over a year because the railways did not want to be part of it. The largest public carrier had...

Adding to the debate over celebrity economists blaming India’s malnutrition and stunting vis-à-vis Sub Saharan Africa on genetic differences, Dean Spears, a public health expert and a visiting fellow at Delhi School of Economics, offers evidence connecting our poor sanitation and Open Defecation with high morbidity and malnutrition. (see both links below). In an evidence-based paper titled Policy Lessons from Implementing India’s Total Sanitation Campaign (2012), based on the review...

-Outlook Social indices topper Kerala just can't stop the baby deaths in its malnutrition-hit tribal Attapady belt Under the thick canopy of a peepal tree, beside the road that winds to Pallur Ooru in Attapady in the Western Ghats, is a small tribal burial ground. There are no tombstones to mark the graves and on closer look one sees tiny mounds where the mud has been disturbed. In a quiet corner,...

-Live Mint Debates on malnutrition ignore links with sanitation and disease and the burdens these impose on children Children in India are among the shortest in the world. Widespread child stunting is a human development tragedy. This is not because there is anything wrong with being short or anything inherently good about being tall. The tragedy is because of what makes children short: we all have different genetic potential heights, but...

-IANS Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has said that sanitation plays an important role in malnutrition and has been often neglected from nutrition debates in the country. "You have rapid economic growth on the one hand and better health indicators, better education indicators, better indicators on water supply but you don't have them reflected in nutrition indicators," Ramesh said at the India launch of the Lancet 2013 series on maternal and child...