-India Today Agriculture powerhouse Madhya Pradesh still suffers from high levels of malnutrition, a contrast that exposes our flawed food policies Madhya Pradesh in mid-March is heavy with the scent of the Mahua blossom. Heaped at village bazaars, and now restricted largely to brewing liquor, its pungent smell is fast disappearing from indigenous tribal stews and curries. On the road to Petlawad and Alirajpur on the western edge of the state, farmers...

Two recent reports show that this social sector scheme has had a causal impact in improving lives, especially for women and children Fourteen million people escaped falling into poverty under the world’s largest anti-poverty programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). In 10 years of its existence, the scheme reduced poverty by 32 per cent. Recent data also shows that more women are drawing cash incomes, more children...

-Economic and Political Weekly While insufficient sanitation facilities often get represented in statistics and are reported in the literature on urban infrastructure planning and contested urban spaces, what is often left out is the everyday practice and experience of going to dysfunctional toilets, particularly by women. By analysing the practices and problems associated with toilet use from a phenomenological perspective, this article aims to situate the issue in the everyday lives...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Education ministers and representatives from every state today pressed for revoking the no-detention policy till Class VIII and bringing back the system of performance based promotions that the Right To Education Act had done away with five years ago. The meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) also heard suggestions to make Class X board exams compulsory. Ministers from 19 states and representatives from others said the...

-The Tribune Chandigarh: The worst fears about the northern region of the country losing its groundwater have been confirmed. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) satellite imagery made available to the Centre warns of fast disappearing of subsoil water in these states. The NASA report forwarded to the Punjab Government by the Union Ministry of Agriculture says that “beneath north India’s irrigated fields, the groundwater has been disappearing”. “It is being...