-Down to Earth An earlier report had said that India accounts for the maximum number of maternal deaths in the world — 17 per cent or nearly 50,000 of the 289,000 The number of women dying during pregnancy, childbirth or within six weeks after birth has fallen by 44 per cent since 1990, say United Nations agencies, including the World Bank. A recently-released report has said that maternal deaths around the world dropped...

-The Hindu Business Line Government surveys on out-of-school children are gross underestimations. The Census numbers, however, are a shocker Census 2011 showed that about 32 million children aged between 6 and 13 years have never attended any educational institution, even though government estimates of out-of-school children show substantially lower numbers. Given that out-of-school numbers consist of both children who dropped out and those who never attended school, it raises some questions over...

-IPSNews.net NEW DELHI: India’s stance on sustainable development goals is evolving as there are differing voices on what should be done. Over the next 15 years, the global development agenda will be preoccupied with the ambitious challenge of achieving 17 SDGs and 169 targets. The SDGs follow the millennium development goals which were conceptualized as a set of eight goals on diverse development dimensions including poverty alleviation, gender equality, health and...

-The Hindu Business Line A narrow focus on growth-led development is the cause of the world’s sustainability crisis, not its solution The world’s political leaders meet in New York today to adopt a ‘sustainable development’ agenda. On the face of it, this sounds very hopeful. It signals that finally, humanity may move towards making peace with the earth, even as it erases the shame of over two billion people still living in...

-The Hindu Rescuing Maternal and Child Health-only systems, which have become under-resourced and have built a very high-cost but low-performance culture, will be a challenging task. Given the rising burden of non-communicable diseases, there is an increasing demand to build health systems that can address these concerns. However, given how large the unfinished agenda of the millennium development goals is, the Indian government has chosen to stay focussed on Maternal and Child...