Commenting on the recently released fifth round of National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data for 17 states and five Union Territories (UTs) in an article published in The Indian Express (dated 6th January, 2021), Arvind Subramanian and his co-authors have stated that India has made progress on certain outcomes, including infant mortality rate (IMR), under-five mortality rate (U5MR) and neonatal mortality rate (NNMR). Relying on various rounds of NFHS data,...

-CaravanMagazine.in The South Asia Collective, a group of human-rights activists and organisations, recently published “The South Asia State of Minorities Report 2020: Minorities and Shrinking Civic Space” by the South Asia Collective. The report examines minority rights and the narrowing of space for human-rights defenders in light of increasing majoritarianism across the region. Its chapters, on Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, conclude that three basic freedoms—the constitutional...

-The Indian Express Human Development Index is the measure of a nation's health, education, and standards of living. India's HDI value for 2019 is 0.645 placing the country in the medium human development category. India slipped two spots to rank 131 among 189 countries in the 2020 human development index, a report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said. Human Development Index is the measure of a nation’s health, education,...

Multidimensional poverty is about non-monetary poverty and is strongly associated with the challenges of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Although previously defined only in monetary terms, poverty is now understood to include the lived reality of people’s experiences and the multiple deprivations they face. India’s multidimensional headcount ratio (H) i.e. the proportion or incidence of people (within a given population) who experience multiple deprivations has reduced from 55.1 percent to...

-TheThirdPole.net Over thirty years since high levels of arsenic was found in groundwater in West Bengal, little has been done to avert a slow-burn health crisis In the Indo-Gangetic plains, there are many widow-villages where the men have died from drinking water laced with arsenic. Women often come to the area to marry and so are only affected later in life. In India, over one million people have died in the last...