-The Hindu It is crucial to align policy across sectors and upgrade the country’s social infrastructure In India’s highly segmented labour market, one can still discern at least three demographic groups that are in urgent need of jobs: a growing number of better educated youth; uneducated agricultural workers who wish to leave agricultural distress behind; and young women, who too are better educated than ever before. India is indeed the fastest growing large economy...

Confirming the rising trend of prevalence of wasting (i.e. too thin for height) among children below 5 years of age, a new report on the state of global hunger shows that during 2017 India ranks 100th among 119 countries in terms of Global Hunger Index (GHI). Entitled 2017 Global Hunger Index: The Inequalities of Hunger, the report indicates that the neighbouring countries such as China (GHI score: 7.5; GHI rank:...

-Scroll.in Notified in September, the rules will facilitate the development of wetlands as real estate, industrial sites and garbage dump After ignoring repeated directions from the Supreme Court to notify stricter rules to protect the country’s wetlands, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change has gone and done just the opposite. On September 26, it published the Wetlands (Conservation & Management) Rules, 2017 – replacing the older rules dating back to...

-TheWire.in Innovate methods are being used to encourage people to end open defecation, but issues like the underutilisation of funds and use of coercive methods to achieve targets remain. The government has run rural sanitation programmes since the 1980s. Yet, according to Census 2011, only about 30% of all rural households have toilets, and even fewer use those toilets. By contrast, under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, several changes have taken place. Efforts towards...

On the 148th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, cleanliness drives were officially organised across the country so as to promote Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. A few days before 2nd October, the National Institute of Nutrition (NIN), under the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), released a report that attempts to connect the dots between sanitation and nutritional status of children. Please click here to access the survey report from NIN.   On...