-The Hindu Eight States have reduced the proportion of underweight children. New official data on nutrition in India’s nine poorest States has shown that while most states have successfully reduced the number of underweight children over the last decade, their record in reducing child stunting has been more mixed. While Bihar and Uttarkhand improved on all indicators, Uttar Pradesh got worse on all. The Office of the Registrar General of India released the...

-Economic and Political Weekly Farmers' unions and political parties have been demanding the implementation of the Swaminathan minimum support price (cost plus 50%) to address agrarian crisis and farmers' distress. But they have not raised demands for the implementation of the recommendations of the National Commission on Farmers, which have the potential to provide lasting solutions. Ranjit Singh Ghuman (ghumanrs@yahoo.co.uk) is a Nehru SAIL Chair Professor, Centre for Research in Rural and...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Election Commission has suspended its five-month-old project to clean the electoral rolls by linking and authenticating voter I-card details with Aadhaar data, days after the Supreme Court ruled that the unique identification number could be used only for PDS and LPG distribution schemes. "All further activities relating to collection/feeding/seeding of Aadhaar number being undertaken under the National Electoral Rolls Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP) shall...

-Livemint.com Effective policy changes at the state-level are needed as this is where the problem and its solutions lie—and not in a National Agricultural Market There have been many attempts at alleviating the pain of the farmer in India, be it natural calamities or market risks, but nothing seems to work, and the problems of farmer distress and indebtedness continue to grow. For some time now, there has been a focus...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Indian weaver is dismissed in high places as an embarrassing anachronism, despite demand for his or her skills and products. In the new millennium, globalisation and a mindless acquiescence to imported notions of a good life threaten to take over, even as the West looks East for better concepts of sustainable living. Analysing today's crisis in the handloom sector, plagued by low-cost imitations from power looms,...