-Outlook Only six states in the country, including Maharashtra and Kerala, are likely to achieve the Millenium Development Goal (MDG) on reducing child mortality by 2015, a report said today. Except Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal, other parts of the country are unlikely to achieve MDG 4, which aims to reduce Under-Five Mortality by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015, unless some key issues are addressed, These observations were...

-The Hindustan Times India contributes more hungry people to the world each year than all other countries put together, and despite efforts, new figures suggest that hunger is far from contained - in fact we are worse off than we were more than a decade ago. According to the Global Hunger Index 2012, recently released by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). India's rating was 22.6 in '96, 24.2 in '01...

-The Hindustan Times Melghat is an incredibly beautiful place — especially, if you visit the forest-rich area after a robust monsoon (like I did). The weather was cool, the sky pale azure and the spectacular cliff-and-ravine landscape green. But this gem of a place, 750 kilometres northeast of Mumbai in Maharashtra’s Amravati district, has an ugly side story: hunger and malnutrition have been killing tribal children and women here for years....

-The Economic Times The Food Security Act would encourage below poverty line women to have more children, defeating the government's population-control efforts, says one of the 1.6 lakh opinions the standing committee on food and consumer affairs has received. The suggestion, hence, is to remove pregnant women from the list of beneficiaries of the food security bill. This is not the only shocking suggestion. Another suggestion is to avoid nutritional protection to...

-The Hindu One in eight people, or 12.5 per cent of the world’s population, is chronically undernourished today says the latest State of Food Insecurity (SOFI) report. The grave ethical and practical implications of this abominable statistic from the three Rome-based United Nations agencies are obvious. Not least because mass hunger is a man-made phenomenon. Historically, hunger and starvation have been caused not by shortfalls in food production but rather by...