-The Times of India Improvement in human development measures has slowed down in the past few years, according to the 2014 Human Development Report (HDR) released on 24 July in Tokyo. The human development index (HDI), a measure derived from life expectancy, education levels and incomes, barely grew from 0.700 in 2012 to 0.702 in 2013. Even that small improvement could be at risk of getting reversed given the bleak picture of...

-Deccan Herald The Green Revolution has changed life in Indian villages, but the main beneficiaries were the landlords. Daily labourers remain poor and marginalised. The limits of using ever more fertiliser and pesticides are becoming apparent. Many farmers are confused because extension services want them to reconsider practices they were told to abandon not that long ago. A member of the Santal tribe, an Adivasi community, assesses things from the village perspective. Since independence...

-Economic and Political Weekly Corruption in Indian medicine is back on the front pages. One would think that there has been an abrupt spurt in corrupt practices or a major scandal. Nothing of that sort has happened. However, there have been some interesting developments for the focus to shift back to what is really a very old affliction. This is an update on recent happenings as the entrepreneurial spirit of the...

-The Economic Times The rationale for embedding nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive programmes in a development agenda is compelling. And yet, strangely, it has been ignored. Planning and implementation of such programmes require collaborative, consistent and aligned effort across multiple sectors. Currently, we have a myopic vision to pursue narrow agendas. Transformational change requires tackling one of the most obdurate challenges: malnutrition. This blight has a large human impact and a larger economic impact...

-The Hindu   The national discourse is so superficial that it only talks of foreign direct investment, investment allowance, tax sops and the like which are just about a twentieth to a sixth of the national economy. It did not even notice paragraph 102 in the Union budget speech which is about half of India's economy. Commentators see facts hidden in budgets as the "devil's in the detail." This presumes that only...