School meals ensure nutrition for millions of vulnerable children across the world. Almost 370 million children worldwide are covered by school feeding programmes. While 100 million school children benefitted from the noon meal scheme in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Brazil (48 million), China (44 million), South Africa (9 million) and Nigeria (9 million) too run similar programmes for school children. However, an estimated 39 billion in-school...

-The Hindu Allowing a scribe for candidate not largesse, says bench The government is not conferring a “largesse” on disabled people by facilitating a scribe during the course of the Civil Services Examination, the Supreme Court held in a judgment on Thursday. The Union Public Service Commission and the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), by allowing a scribe, are not allowing them a “privilege”, a Bench led by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud declared...

-NDTV blog If you had invested all your savings in the stock market at the end of March last year, by now, you would have almost doubled your money. But in the same period, India's GDP in today's prices would have slid by at least 9-10 percent. Anyone who looks at this divergence will say that the markets have completely 'decoupled' from the economy. Conventional wisdom tells us that this is a...

-Down to Earth While total allocations to Union budget 2021-22 saw an increase of 14.5%, the share for children declined by 10.8% compared to 2020 The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has dealt a serious blow to the Indian economy. The economic slowdown has aggravated poverty, disrupted public provisioning for children’s welfare, exacerbated existing gaps in availability, access and utilisation of Services. It has multiplied challenges for children from marginalised communities. Healthcare, nutrition,...

-The Hindu They play a vital role in human resources development, they tell Centre A group of 100 disability rights organisations and activists wrote to Social Justice and Empowerment Minister Thawarchand Gehlot asking him not to go ahead with the proposed merger and closure of several institutes under the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (DEPwD). They said the institutes and regional centres were set up by the government “in pursuit of...