-The Hindu     Women are essential for the success of schemes like the mid-day meal programme. Improving their wages and working conditions would be better than blaming them when things go wrong. Mahatma Gandhi once declared, "A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." By this yardstick, India does not fare well. Consider recent headlines alone: 23 Bihari children die after eating poisoned midday meals at their schools. Six-year-old...

-The Hindu Social audits of the mid-day meal scheme by parents can ensure that the world's largest intervention against hunger that also helps keep children in school need not suffer setbacks like the Bihar tragedy This week, 23 children lost their lives after having a mid-day meal served at a school in Bihar's Saran district. Preliminary reports suggest that the school lacked a storage facility for foodgrain which led to contamination and...

-The Guardian Half of Indians have no toilet. It's one of many gigantic failures that have prompted Nobel prize-winning academic Amartya Sen to write a devastating critique of India's economic boom The roses are blooming at the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings. There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction...

-The Business Standard Chhattisgarh Food Security Bill was passed on Dec 21, 2012. Under the Act, about 90% of the state's population will have PDS entitlements Raipur: In December 2007, when Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh announced no one would die of starvation, not many realised the state was going to create history. The announcement came from the sleepy village of Sonakhan in Mahasamund district, where in 1856, the landlord of the area,...

-Live Mint The fundamental pathology of Indian policy is the overwhelming preference for subsidies over public goods One useful way to understand a fundamental flaw in policymaking in India since 2004 is to ask a rhetorical question: why is the ruling United Progressive Alliance aggressively pushing for a law guaranteeing the right to food rather than one for the right to clean drinking water? Take a look at the numbers. A February...