-The Hindu R.P. Gupta, Principal Secretary to Government of Gujarat, Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs Department, writes: "In Gujarat, PDS is exclusionary, leaky, getting worse" (August 17), your Correspondent Rukmini S., mainly focuses on the alleged weakness of the Gujarat Public Distribution System based on old data. It is clear that she has not countered any of the points raised by the Chief Minister of Gujarat. The article mentions some analysis of...

-Economic and Political Weekly Indian children are very short, on average, compared with children living in other countries. Because height reflects early life health and net nutrition, and because good early life health also helps brains to grow and capabilities to develop, widespread growth faltering is a human development disaster. Panagariya acknowledges these facts, but argues that Indian children are particularly short because they are genetically programmed to be so. In...

-Economic and Political Weekly     Are Indian statistics on the extent of under-nutrition exaggerated and based on faulty yardsticks? Is there a case for moving away from the World Health Organisation standards? Can "genetics" really explain the low heights and weights among Indian children? Is it a puzzle and does it say something about the Indian estimates that Sub-Saharan Africa shows lower levels of under-nutrition than India though the former suffers...

-Economic and Political Weekly In his article Arvind Panagariya argues that (a) the prevailing narrative of child malnutrition being worse in India "than nearly all Sub-Saharan African countries with lower per capita incomes" is false, (b) that this notion is an "artefact of a faulty methodology", and (c) that the nutrition situation and recent trends in India are not so bad anyway. Please click here to read the entire article. ...

-Economic and Political Weekly In his article, "Does India Really Suffer from Worse Child Malnutrition Than Sub-Saharan Africa?", Arvind Panagariya makes an impassioned case against accepting traditional measures that indicate that Indian children suffer from worse malnutrition than their African counterparts. This phenomenon - that Indian children are more stunted despite the country's better performance on an array of other health and development indicators was dubbed the "South Asian Enigma" in...