-Economic and Political Weekly There are few areas where the statistics are as dismal as child health in India. This paper analyses four interrelated child health indicators in West Bengal - child malnourishment (measured by the rates of stunting and wasting), prenatal, infant, and child mortality rates. It also provides evidence on how these rates vary with the gender of the child, parental education, and the wealth status of households. West...

-Institute of Economic Growth This paper focusses on two Indian laws that seek to guarantee socioeconomic rights: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), an important example of India's recent history of legislation of social and economic rights, and the proposed National Food Security Act (NFSA), currently in Parliament. Various means of democratic politics, including a ten-year old public interest litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court and public mobilisation through the...

-Newsclick.in Recent studies have shown that even as India fares better than many developing regions of the world on several indicators of growth and development such as GDP, per capita, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), literacy, life expectancy, etc., the number of malnourished children in India is significantly high. What explains this paradox? The Union Cabinet recently approved a multi-sectoral nutritional programme proposed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development to reduce...

-Down to Earth   This defies logic. Despite rapid economic growth, India has often been placed below sub-Saharan African countries that have very high number of malnourished children. But the government has no data to clarify its position. In the first week of September, Parliament’s Committee on Estimates criticised the government, saying: “The committee is surprised to note that in the modern era of Information and Technology, there is no recent official...

-The Indian Express Mumbai: Over 21 per cent of undertrials in the country in 2012 were Muslims. However, members of the community comprised only 17.75 per cent of the convicts, reveals analysis of prison data released by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). This suggests a large number of arrested Muslims are released by the courts. The inverse is true of all other communities. Hindus comprised 69.92 per cent of undertrials and 71.35 per cent...