-The Indian Express   The rain gods seem to have ignored the once-fertile region of Sambalpur with farmers fighting drought for the third successive cultivating season. The drought situation led yet another farmer of Western Orissa to end his life, third in a week. The two deaths earlier this week were reported from Bargarh district. On Friday, a 25-year-old farmer, Samir Kumar Naik of Ramtileimal village in Paruabhadi gram panchayat under Kuchinda block...

Even as this shocking number of malnutrition deaths is reported from Nashik alone, much of Rs 600 crore child welfare budget seems to have been spent on expensive toys et al In commodity purchases that seem to give direct competition to the Organising Committee's orders for the Commonwealth Games (CWG), the State Women and Child Development department spent Rs 13,801 each for a set of four steel utensils consisting of a...

-The Times of India   First the good news: India has recorded a 33% drop in newborn deaths between 1990 and 2009. Now, the bad news. Despite the sharp drop, over 9 lakh newborns died in 2009, the highest in the world. The most comprehensive newborn death estimates so far - covering all 193 countries and spanning 20 years released by the World Health Organization, Save the Children and the London School...

-The Economist   The number of deaths among babies is declining The first 28 days of life are among the most vulnerable in a human’s existence. In 2009 3.3m children died before they were four weeks old, down from 4.6m in 1990, according to a new  paper from the World Health Organisation. However progress has been too slow to meet the fourth of the UN's Millennium Development Goals—to cut child mortality to one-third...

Purpose of RTI Act will be lost if killings continue, says CPI(M) member The murder of RTI activist Shehla Masood in Bhopal found an echo in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday with a Communist Party of India (Marxist) member expressing serious concern over the killings across the country and demanding steps to protect whistleblowers. Raising the issue during the Zero Hour, Moin-ul-Hassan said the RTI activist was killed on a day when...