-The Hindu Ignoring hunger and malnutrition will have significant costs to any country's development. Nutrition improvement has both intrinsic and instrumental value One of the disappointments in the post-reform period in India has been the slow progress in the reduction of malnutrition, especially with reference to the underweight among children. In fact, the rate of change in the percentage of underweight children has been negligible in the period 1998-99 to 2005-06; the...

-The Indian Express Moves to dilute labour-material ratio in MGNREGA and focus exclusively on select backward blocks will adversely impact rural poor. Before the general elections, free-market fundamentalists had lobbied fiercely to reshape so-called wasteful social-sector expenditures. Primary among their targets was the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which, according to them, should become an unconditional cash transfer scheme. Post-elections, the late Gopinath Munde's espousal of the MGNREGA went...

-The Hindu Rapid urbanisation, globalisation, consumerism, poor solid waste and water management and increasing population movement have created new habitats for mosquito breeding Dengue fever is rearing its ugly head again in India with new cases of infections and even deaths being reported from different States. The world's fastest growing vector-borne disease, dengue sees an estimated 50-100 million cases being reported annually in over 100 endemic countries. Ever since its detection in...

-The Hindu The first 1,000 days of life, between a woman's pregnancy and her child's second birthday, are critical for influencing lifelong health and intellectual development of the child The Human Development Report (HDR) released in July 2014 made an important revelation: that India continues to be positioned at 135 in the ranking of 187 countries based on the Human Development Index, and has not moved from where it was positioned the...

-The Business Standard World Bank-IMF study, however, says pace of reduction in absolute poverty has been substantial; report stresses skills training for youth India was home to about a third of the world's poor in 2011, according to a progress report on various social indicators from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), issued on Wednesday. In other words, the highest number of the poor lived in India in...