-The Times of India Many members of the Niti Aayog's newly constituted Working Group on Nutrition have significant conflicts of interests. Several are representatives of international agencies, which have close ties to multinational food companies including Nestle, Hindustan Unilever, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Mars and Ajinomoto, and which have been pushing packaged therapeutic food to address malnutrition. The government has repeatedly clarified that packaged energy dense food is against India's policy on...

-Livemint.com India’s new industrial policy is an opportunity to address the problems of low R&D spending and tough competition from cheap Chinese imports The framing of the new industrial policy should be seen as an opportunity to chart a meaningful path for industry’s role in India’s development. The recently released discussion paper by the department of industrial policy and promotion mentions two points that need to be examined closely to grasp the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Three districts - Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, Koraput in Odisha and Thane in Maharashtra - will initiate India's ambitious 'Zero Hunger' programme through interventions in farm sector on October 16 (World Food Day). Though many more districts will eventually be covered under this dedicated farm-based programme in sync with India's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end hunger by 2030, these three would act as a model...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Women and Child Development ministry has written to all states and union territories that there isn't enough evidence to support the use of Ready-to-Use-Therapeutic foods (RUTF) for the management of severe acute malnutrition (SAM). This is a blow to the multi-crore complex of international NGOs who push packaged food as a strategy to address severe malnutrition and companies that produce them. The WCD letter pointed...

-The Telegraph Calcutta: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the chairman and managing director of Biotechnology company Biocon, today said incidents like the Gorakhpur hospital child deaths should trigger the debate "why we spend only 1 per cent of our GDP on health care". Mazumdar-Shaw, who was awarded DSc (honoris causa) by Presidency University, said: "A very, very worrying trend in India is that we spend only 1 per cent of our GDP on health care....