National Food Security Act can help bring down malnutrition and maternal mortality rates in the country, Biraj Patnaik, principal adviser to the Supreme Court commissioners on right to food, said Wednesday. 'Anaemia during pregnancy is one of the main reasons for maternal death, because that may cause haemorrhage. Food supplement which can tackle iron deficiency is the way to face this challenge,' Patnaik said. According to Patnaik, the body mass index (BMI)...

A meticulous study of the agrarian relations in three villages. ONE of our senior sociologists once drew my attention to the distinction between economics and other social sciences. Other social sciences – sociology and anthropology, for instance – he said, pay a great deal of attention to gathering primary data and interpreting them, whereas economics relies on secondary data for its analysis. This is, to a large extent, a fair...

In 1957, the Communist Party of Kerala became the first democratically elected communist government in Asia. While many in the West feared that this election would help communism spread across South Asia and make Kerala the "Yan'an of India", the Keralite communists' actions were checked by Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress party's control of the federal coffers. Instead, from within the political bounds of India's divided government, Kerala initiated what has...

 Adolescent girls from 22 districts of the state will now get Centre’s support to continue education and receive complete nutrition. The Centre has chosen 22 districts from Uttar Pradesh to implement the Rajiv Gandhi Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent girls (RGSEAG-Sabla). To be formally launched across 200 districts in the country from mid-November, the scheme aims to empower out-of-school girls ¿ by educating them and providing them with nutritional support. The Department...

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, since 2003, one Indian farmer has committed suicide every 30 minutes. In 2008, 16,196 farmers took their own lives, bringing the total number of farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2008 to 199,132. (Significantly, P. Sainath is of the opinion that like all government data, these figures too are unreliable. For when women farmhands kill themselves, their deaths are not enlisted as...