An unprecedented economic growth during the last decade has also seen increasing malnutrition, hunger and starvation amongst certain sections of society. India ranks 66 in the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) World Hunger Index of 88 countries (Inter-national Food Policy Research Institute). More than 200 million people in this country are denied the right to food. One-third of all underweight children (57 million) in the world due to lack of...

Child malnutrition in Gulbarga and Bijapur districts is a blot on Karnataka's image. Ba Ba Basavanna Anganwadi Hogona Avarekaalu Tinnona Ah, Aaa, Ee, Eee, Bariyona Mane Kadege Hogona (Come, Come, Basavanna Let's go to the anganwadi Let us eat beans And write A, B, C, D, And head towards home.) As Savitri Nimbad sings this ditty, the more than 20 children seated in a circle around her repeat each line in shrill voices. Almost all of them are between three and...

-The Economic Times   The UPA government - especially the Planning Commission - has been taken to task for fixing a poverty line at a level (Rs 32 per capita/day in urban areas) that does not even guarantee a bare subsistence. In the medley of scathing critiques and rebuttals, three strands of arguments seem dominant. One is that the poverty line is utterly unrealistic as a measure of subsistence requirements of food, health...

The contrast could not have been starker. On one side is an English teacher leading fishermen and villagers, using his unbridled oratory to spew propaganda against Kudankulam’s ready-to-start nuclear plant that will produce 1,000MW. Arraigned against him is a group of engineers who have devoted their lives to building nuclear power plants. Affable, soft-spoken and hurt that the world’s “safest” nuclear plant that they have built has not been allowed to...

'Economic growth will need massive energy. Will we allow an accident in Japan, in a 40-year-old reactor at Fukushima, arising out of extreme natural stresses, to derail our dreams to be an economically developed nation?' Every single atom in the universe carries an unimaginably powerful battery within its heart, called the nucleus. This form of energy, often called Type-1 fuel, is hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times more powerful...