As of 2006, over 43% of Indian children under five were malnourished, a rate that has barely budged since the early 1990s. This gives India the dubious distinction of having the highest percentage of malnourished children in the world. There are at least 53 poorer countries with lower malnutrition rates, including Bangladesh, Nepal, Haiti and several African countries. At Independence, India was poor, so it wasn’t thought possible to guarantee...

Budget 2011-12 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. THREE decades ago, in the early years of the Special Component Plan (SCP) for Scheduled Castes – very recently renamed inappropriately as Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) – Indira Gandhi on her return as Prime Minister wrote two historical D.O. letters dated March 12, 1980, one to Central Ministers and the other to State Chief Ministers, regarding the SCP in the Central...

THE Tamil Nadu government introduced with much fanfare the samathuva mayanam (common graveyard) concept during the previous Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam regime with the proclaimed goal of ending all caste-based discrimination at burial-cum-cremation grounds. An official announcement was made that panchayats which set up samathuva mayanams would get an “incentive grant” of Rs.1 lakh for promoting communal harmony. A few panchayats had received the incentive when the government appeared to beat a hasty...

Have right, will ask. That's the spirit of the growing number of information seekers in the state who are increasingly using the Right to Information (RTI) Act to know who's spending taxpayers' money — and how. Enacted in the summer of 2005, the RTI Act has seen a dramatic rise in its users with Karnataka registering a 10-fold increase in just four years. Latest figures by the Karnataka Information Commission, the...

Over the last couple of years, the Delhi government's budgets had focussed largely on beefing up the city's physical infrastructure in time for the Commonwealth Games. With the Games over, the budget for 2011-12, the first presented by Sheila Dikshit, shifted focus to social infrastructure with welfare measures in health and education targetted at the school-going. Welfare measures apart, the budget cited environmental concerns to hike taxes on diesel vehicles and...