-The Telegraph Nearly 10 crore children have the midday meal in 11 lakh schools every working day New Delhi: The Centre has allowed privately managed centralised kitchens to be engaged to serve food to schoolchildren in Rural Areas under its midday meal scheme — a decision it had earlier announced in May 2017 only to roll back in April this year — raising fears of loss of jobs for thousands of cooks. Trade...

-The Hindu Breastfeeding is inversely proportional to household wealth and other factors, says study. Malnutrition among children in urban India is characterised by relatively poor levels of breastfeeding, higher prevalence of iron and Vitamin D deficiency as well as obesity due to long commute by working mothers, prosperity and lifestyle patterns, while rural parts of the country see higher percentage of children suffering from stunting, underweight and wasting and lower consumption of...

-Press release of 4th All India Media Conference, dated 8 October, 2019 Udaipur, Oct. 8: More than 300 media practitioners, researchers, scholars and educationists from different states of India and from four foreign countries took a pledge to empower the underprivileged sections of society by ending the digital divide and create new opportunities to highlight the issues of common people, Rural Areas, landless labourers, malnourished children and farmers affected by climate...

-The Hindu The campaign to end open defecation can succeed only if it takes communities with it India’s declaration on the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi that its Rural Areas are now open defecation-free will be acknowledged around the world as a milestone in its developmental journey. Cleanliness and sanitation were central to Gandhi’s concerns for his vast number of impoverished countrymen, and should ideally have been pursued zealously by governments...

-The Hindu Business Line Noted Gandhian economist Dr Sudarshan Iyengar surveys the distressed agricultural landscape, pinpoints its weaknesses, and prescribes solutions with their roots in Gandhian agronomics. Edited excerpts from an interview to BusinessLine: * Given the agrarian crisis in India today, how relevant are Gandhi's economic principles based on the village economy, and equitable distribution of resources? They are relevant in the context of Gandhi's view of gram swaraj (village self-rule), which...