-The Telegraph Bhubaneswar: The Naveen Patnaik government has plans to spice up the midday meal platter by serving fish that officials say will push up its nutritional quotient. The move, if implemented, will be in accordance with the recommendations of the Odisha State Food Commission that had submitted its report to the government last month. The commission's report had suggested measures required to strengthen the nutritional content of food served at schools and...

-The Times of India An NGO in Chhattisgarh is addressing the urgent deficit in nutrition by providing three meals a day to children under three along with daycare Sumita Dhruv's life revolves around rice — sowing, irrigating, and harvesting it. And yet very little of it reaches her two-year-old daughter Shristi. Like most children in the village of Baigahara, 50 km from Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, Shristi was born underweight. Her eyes were...

-Down to Earth Jean Dreze on why he prefers a solidarity society, rather than a welfare state * Are you actually an advocate of the welfare state? Ideally, I would prefer to think in terms of a solidarity society rather than welfare state, for two reasons. First, private non-profit institutions can play a very useful role in the social sector. In many countries, some of the best schools and health centres are run...

-The Hindu If we oppose every solution to the problem of air pollution, how will we ever breathe clean air, asks the environmentalist Environmentalist Sunita Narain has been fighting for clean air for decades. The Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, with which she has been associated and now serves as director general, led the shift to compressed natural gas in Delhi, to reduce air pollution. Ms. Narain is on the statutory...

-TheWire.in Based on a militarised notion of ‘targeting’, such welfare policies deny citizens the right to basic services. In an incisive analysis on anti-poverty and other social security programmes, Professor Amartya Sen astutely asks why the notion of targeting, which is essentially a military concept, is so routinely invoked in analytical discourses on basic welfare rights for the people as well as in policy framing in this respect. Indeed, why would an...