-The Times of India LONDON: Food wastage is monumental globally, with 30 and 50% of food produced in the world (1.2-2 billion tonnes) is wasted. British MPs on the International Development Committee placed the country's most exhaustive assessment of food security in parliament on Tuesday and has thrown up some seriously worrying findings. They fear that food wastage globally could be as high as 50%. Valuable resources of land, energy, fertiliser and water...

-The Hindu The rationale behind the Union government's decision to extend for four more years the Integrated Action Plan for naxal-affected districts in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, is clear enough. So is its timing, coming as it does days after the Maoist rampage in Chhattisgarh. Out of an annual allocation of Rs. 1,000 crore, each of the 82 districts identified...

-The Telegraph The Union health ministry has signalled its intentions to go ahead with plans to introduce a cadre of rural health care providers through a new BSc course, ignoring objections from a parliamentary panel. The ministry told Delhi High Court this week that it had sent a draft cabinet note on the three-and-a-half-year course in community health to the Prime Minister's Office for comments. This is standard procedure before the matter...

-Frontline The Central government's proposal to hand over the supply of supplementary nutrition to NGOs in the name of "community participation" is surely an invitation for private profiteering on the back of this supposedly public scheme. ENSURING safe and healthy conditions for the reproduction of the population is obviously the most fundamental requirement of any society. So the progress of a society can be determined (and indeed is routinely judged) by the...

-The Hindu Mumbai: Unsafe abortions are killing a woman every two hours in this country, according to estimates and calculations correlating data on maternal mortality ratio (MMR) and Sample Registration System (SRS) data by Ipas, India, an international NGO working on increasing access to safe abortion services. The last nationwide MMR data giving details of causes of maternal deaths was in SRS 2001-03, said advisor, policy for Ipas India, Medha Gandhi. While...