-The Business Standard Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, who has just written An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions with Jean Dreze, tells Mihir S Sharma that he doesn't understand why his book has received an angry reaction, or why he is being called anti-growth and pro-redistribution. * Is it startling to discover that you are being called a licence Raj socialist? It is very strange indeed. Perhaps some of this reaction is...

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...

-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...

-Live Mint The country is a happy hunting ground for communicable diseases In a Mint article last week, economist Dean Spears pointed out that the double whammy of high population density and unsanitary conditions in India stunts the growth of children, who bear a disproportionate burden of infectious diseases and lose their ability to absorb nutrients. Unless India ramps up its public health system, providing extra food will mean little for...

-The Times of India Robert E Black is the lead author of the Lancet series on Maternal and Child Nutrition as well as professor and chairman at the department of international health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As the 2013 Lancet series is launched, Black spoke with Rema Nagarajan about its approach to tackling malnutrition, controversies over reach-ing out to commercial food interests - and vital problems causing malnutrition...