-The United Nations   The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) today launched a web-based tool that gives governments and health-care providers access to clear guidance on how to scale up life-saving nutrition interventions to combat all forms of malnutrition. The WHO e-Library of Evidence for Nutrition Actions (eLENA), launched at the beginning of a three-day Asian regional meeting on nutrition in Colombo, Sri Lanka, is designed to help governments overcome one...

The bidirectional relationship between economic development and health justifies greater investment in the health sector. The National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) has been described as one of the largest and most ambitious programmes to revive health care in the world and has many achievements to its credit. It seeks to provide universal access to health care, which is affordable, equitable, and of good quality. It has increased health finance, improved infrastructure...

The Food Security Bill, approved by a group of ministers this month, has ignored malnutrition as a subject, surprising many observers in UN bodies. The reason given is a turf war among different central ministries. According to N C Saxena, a member of the National Advisory Council that has opposed the government’s draft of the Bill, the women and child development ministry was against including the subject in the Bill as...

New tensions are emerging between the government and its think tank, with the food ministry making major changes to a National Advisory Council (NAC) draft of a new law slated to become the blockbuster social-security scheme of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s troubled second tenure. Key provisions of the national food security Bill, 2011, due to be introduced in Parliament’s next session starting 2 August, and estimated to cost the...

-PTI   India has contributed to a large reduction in global poverty, according to the UN annual report on the Millennium Development Goals , which also pointed out that despite progress, the most vulnerable sections of society were being left out. The report, which was released on Thursday , said that poverty continues to decline in many countries and regions. It said that the fastest and sharpest reductions in poverty were in Eastern...