-TheWire.in Mid-day meal cooks in Bihar – mostly women from Dalit and Adivasi communities – are subject to the worst kind of institutional gender discrimination. Patna/Jehanabad/Bhojpur (Bihar): On February 11, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi served the third billionth Akshay Patra mid-day meal in Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh, he said that his “government has given special focus on the nutrition of the children because a healthy childhood is the foundation of New India”. “Modiji...

-Livemint.com * Nearly 67% children in Singhbhum are underweight, the highest in India. More than half are stunted and a third suffer from wasting * In Jharkhand, malnutrition is still an alien concept, and the lack of drinking water, ration or electricity supercedes need for healthcare Singhbhum: In the waiting room of a hospital ward in Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum district, Mukul Kalandiya is carefully holding something that from a distance looks like a...

-Firstpost.com Rajasthan’s relationship with summer is not a pleasant one. The shortage of water in the region only adds to the misery of the people. Even before the onset of summer, over 5,000 villages in nine districts in Rajasthan — Barmer, Churu, Pali, Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Jalore, Jodhpur, Hanumangarh and Nagaur were declared ‘drought-affected’ by the state government. The drought in this area affects the economy of the region as employment options...

-The Hindu New Delhi: Anganwadi services have a poor reach among key beneficiaries – the poorest of the poor and uneducated mothers – according to a paper published in a WHO bulletin recently. The government’s Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) provides a package of six services at anganwadi or child-care centres to young children and pregnant women and lactating mothers. These services include supplementary nutrition, referral services, immunisation, health check-up, pre-school non-formal...

-Livemint.com In conversation with Guy Standing, economist at the School Of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Neither the Narendra Modi government nor Rahul Gandhi have gotten minimum income scheme right, he says New Delhi: Income support is the big economic idea of the season. While the ruling BJP government announced a limited money transfer scheme targeted at farmers in the recent interim budget, the Congress has proposed to solve the country’s...