-IANS Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has said that sanitation plays an important role in malnutrition and has been often neglected from nutrition debates in the country. "You have rapid economic growth on the one hand and better health indicators, better education indicators, better indicators on water supply but you don't have them reflected in nutrition indicators," Ramesh said at the India launch of the Lancet 2013 series on maternal and child...

-PTI HYDERABAD: An advanced facility to help speed up development and selection of crop varieties, which are tolerant to drought, flood and heat in a more precise way, is being set up at the Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA) here. The facility -- Phenomics platform -- is being set up at an estimated cost of Rs 10 crore under the National Initiative on Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) to study climate...

As fatal rains batter parts of the north Indian hill state of Uttarakhand, following a summer that also saw hundreds of deaths from heat waves, a new assessment out on June 19 from the World Bank warns of increasingly difficult effects of climate change on several parts of South Asia in the next 20-30 years. It argues that extreme weather events are likely to get more frequent, as temperatures rise. The...

-The Telegraph Ranchi: Among 85,000 children between 6 and 14 with disabilities, about 70,000 have been enrolled in schools, says a report of Jharkhand Education Project Council (JEPC) that finds a mention in Unicef's Global Report on the State of World's Children-2013. The report, which was released at Suchana Bhawan today by the UNICEF in the presence of state authorities, also mentioned that the prevalence of disability was 1.7 per cent -...

Argumentative Indians are at it again! After sparring over the poverty line and the actual number of poor, India's renowned economists have fired up a fresh debate over the extent of malnutrition. In the earlier debate, the Planning Commission ‘reduced' poverty on paper disregarding NSSO and official committees, including the NCEUS, which determined that 77% Indians survived on less than Rs 20 a day. Columbia university economist Arvind Panagariya has...