-The Indian Express New Delhi: This July, 23 school children from a village in Bihar died after eating mid-day meals contaminated with pesticide. While the incident was the first such to be reported in the country, data shows that in the past 10 years, 2,069 children across the country have taken ill after consuming food provided under the mid-day meal scheme, with figure from Delhi topping the list. According to data collected...

-Newsclick.in Recent studies have shown that even as India fares better than many developing regions of the world on several indicators of growth and development such as GDP, per capita, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), literacy, life expectancy, etc., the number of malnourished children in India is significantly high. What explains this paradox? The Union Cabinet recently approved a multi-sectoral nutritional programme proposed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development to reduce...

-The Hindu The Union Ministry of Labour has done well to raise the salary cap for availing Employees' State Insurance (ESI) to Rs.25,000. While the move is expected to expand coverage to an additional five million workers and their dependents, this is still small comfort in a country where barely three per cent of the workforce enjoys any social protection. The evolution of ESI has been characterised by an accent...

-The Hindustan Times Last winter, two men were hanged to death in India's jails, indicted for crimes of terror. On August 8, another man, Maganlal Barela- a little-known tribal cultivator, charged with killing his five little daughters - was scheduled to hang in the Jabalpur Central Jail. Human rights lawyers chanced to read of his hanging in an online news item the evening before his execution was fixed, and rushed to meet...

-The Hindu The role of education in reducing poverty is widely recognised but our planners are yet to realise how the impoverished struggle with a learning process that is unresponsive to their needs In a society where poverty is far more common than prosperity, one would expect the implications of poverty for education to be widely recognised. What we find, instead, is that poverty is seldom mentioned directly in policy documents on...