-Scroll.in The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns disrupted the education of millions of students in India. When schools reopened, many never went back. At 10 am on a Tuesday in November, a group of children aged around 7 walked slowly towards their school in Mudnal Dhodu Thaanda, a Banjara community settlement in North Karnataka’s Yadgir district. The children were dressed in their school uniform: light blue shirts and dark blue skirts and pants....

-The Telegraph Influential Lingayat and Hindu seers say they will brook no deviation from a purely vegetarian diet for children Bangalore: A 14-year-old Karnataka schoolgirl has told powerful seers opposing boiled eggs in midday meals they don’t understand the problems of the poor and have no business telling them what they should eat. In a video clip widely shared on social media, Anjali, a Class VIII student of MNM Government Girls School at...

-The Hindu It is high time that the process of monitoring nutrition got importance over survey outcomes The National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 shows negligible gains in nutritional outcomes among under-five children. There has been tardy progress in reducing undernutrition, wasting and stunting. It is a national shame that even now, 35.5% of under-five children are stunted and 19.3% are wasted. Childhood anaemia has worsened from NFHS-4. Anaemia among adolescent girls and...

The virility of Muslim men vis-à-vis men from other religious communities have often been used as a political tool and to create a divisive agenda just before elections for getting votes from the majority of the Indian electorate who are Hindus. Instead of focusing on positive agendas like human development, employment generation, and poverty reduction, political campaigns just before the elections oftentimes reduce to mere communal propaganda (when a lot...

-The Hindu COVID-19 or otherwise, educational institutions need to ensure that schoolchildren are nurtured and nourished With COVID-19 cases reducing in the country, several establishments, including schools, are opening again. While the reopening of all schools is on the anvil, the festive season ahead and the fact that children are not yet in the ambit of the vaccination drive are causing apprehension. We, as a society, must focus on the nutrition of...