School meals ensure nutrition for millions of vulnerable children across the world. Almost 370 million children worldwide are covered by school feeding programmes. While 100 million school children benefitted from the noon meal scheme in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Brazil (48 million), China (44 million), South Africa (9 million) and Nigeria (9 million) too run similar programmes for school children. However, an estimated 39 billion in-school...

Commenting on the recently released fifth round of National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data for 17 states and five Union Territories (UTs) in an article published in The Indian Express (dated 6th January, 2021), Arvind Subramanian and his co-authors have stated that India has made progress on certain outcomes, including infant mortality rate (IMR), under-five mortality rate (U5MR) and neonatal mortality rate (NNMR). Relying on various rounds of NFHS data,...

-Hindustan Times According to data shared by the department, around 560,000 children were enrolled in Delhi’s anganwadi centres before the lockdown was enforced in March, a number which has since shot up Over 100,000 children have enrolled in the city’s anganwadi centres over the course of the pandemic, official data shows, as families whose incomes have been severely hit over the past few month move their children from private institutions in search...

-TheNewsMinute.com In the season of ‘no data available’ TNM lists an exhaustive number of things that the Union Government claims it has no data on. After the Union Government’s response of ‘no data available’ to several questions in the parliament, the way in which the country’s official statistics and data is being managed has come into question.  While it has become fodder for many memes, the dearth of data, either due to...

-GaonConnection.com Chhattisgarh has become the first state in the country to reopen its anganwadi centres amid the COVID-19 to offer health and nutrition services to kids and women After remaining shut for almost half a year, 55,000 anganwadis in Chhattisgarh reopened yesterday on September 7 to provide hot nutritious meals and health services to 1.5 million children under the age of six years, and 0.5 million pregnant and lactating women registered with...