-The Asian Age The fact is that even if India was a few notches higher, it still would be among the severe cases in terms of the magnitude of malnourishment. Do we really trail North Korea and Iraq in the malnutrition stakes? There have been outbursts of anger at India being ranked 100th out 119 countries in the latest edition of the Global Hunger Index by the International Food Policy Research Institute...

-The Financial Express Pune: The special task force in Maharashtra to tackle agrarian crisis Vasantrao Naik Sheti Swavlamban Mission (VNSSM) chairman Kishor Tiwari on Monday blamed the Swiss agrochemicals company Syngenta, Germany’s Bayer and Bayer-owned Monsanto for recent deaths of farmers due to pesticide exposure to the cotton belt of Yavatmal. In a statement issued here, he said that they have been accused of distributing dangerous pesticides without sufficient safety information...

-Hindustan Times The Uttarakhand government has finalised a policy to double income of small and marginal farmers in the next five years by encouraging them to adopt the best farm practices, with the overall plan of keeping a check on forced migration from hills Dehradun: The Uttarakhand government has finalised a policy to double income of small and marginal farmers in the next five years by encouraging them to adopt the best farm practices,...

-Newsclick.in An average urban family suffers from chronic undernutrition, with its food consumption deficient in protein, energy, and important vitamins and minerals. A recently released report on the Nutritional Status of Urban Population by National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (NNMB), throws light on the chronic undernutrition faced by India’s urban population, particularly the urban poor. The report compares the average consumption of different food groups by the urban population, to the scientifically calculated Required...

-Down to Earth Why did we grant Pfizer's claim on a pneumonia vaccine which has been rejected elsewhere? In august, the medical and public Health fraternity was stunned when India’s Patent Office granted US pharma giant Pfizer’s claim on its vaccine against pneumonia, the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV), marketed as Prevnar13. For a country that has stricter patentability criteria than most others, India’s decision was baffling because Pfizer’s patent has been rejected...