-The Hindu Maternity entitlements are an important policy tool for encouraging better maternal health. This is why we need to do away with conditionality in cash transfer schemes Since the National Food Security Act (NFSA) was passed in 2013, policy circles have been buzzing with talk of reforms in the public distribution system (PDS). Less well appreciated is the NFSA’s potential to call attention to, and help address, poor maternal nutrition — an aspect...

  A French journalist once wrote: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Perhaps the same can be said about nutritional status of children in West Bengal at present in comparison to the past. At the time when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, was entertaining private capital in Singur and Nandigram, the rate of undernutrition was quite high in his state. A little less than...

-CaravanMagazine.in Bina Agarwal is a Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the University of Manchester, UK. Prior to this, she was the Director and Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University. Agarwal has written extensively on land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; legal change; and agriculture and technological transformation. Her best known work is A Field...

-The Hindu Business Line New Delhi: Social sector experts have sought wider coverage of social security benefits and increased allocation for the Right to Education, schemes for nutrition for children and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. “There is a deficit of 9 lakh teachers. We have demanded allocation of at least 10 per cent of the national income to education and implementation of the Right to Education by the...

-The Hindu The National Food Security Act is finally making headway in the poorest States. Amplified by reforms in the Public Distribution System, a modicum of nutritional support and economic security to all vulnerable households is now a real possibility. Dhobargram is a small Santhal village in Bankura district of West Bengal, with 100 households or so. Most of them are poor, or even very poor, by any plausible standard. There are...