-One World South Asia The mid-day meal tragedy in Bihar has drawn attention directly to the way we articulate and work for educational entitlements, writes Parvinder Singh and Priyanka Sarkar. Lucknow: It takes an informed and empowered community to harvest the fruits of educational entitlements, including non-discriminatory access to midday meals. The promises made in the Right to Education Act can only be wrested as rights when they are owned by the...

-Down to Earth Centre wants to treat anaemia with iron tablets. Can pills substitute nutritious food? Eleven-year-old Indumati Katla, who lives in Wazirpur, Delhi, went to school on July 17. There, her class teacher asked her to gulp down a maroon tablet. Two hours later, she was in hospital recuperating from severe nausea, giddiness and fatigue. She was among the 200 government school students in Delhi who fell ill that day after...

-Down to Earth Government claims a huge drop in poverty numbers but critical indicators-health, malnutrition and wages-continue to be grim. So how did the poor fare better? After a long, long time there was good news to splash as media led with the report of a record 21.9 per cent drop in poverty levels. The July 24 newspaper headlines were celebratory as they reported the Planning Commission's findings that poverty rates...

-The Economic Times The state-run Rubber Board is turning to the rural employment guarantee programme to increase India's natural rubber output from the present 9 million tonne a year. With rising global demand for rubber, the board is keen to extend the area under cultivation. It has identified 400,000 hectare in the North East, 100,000 hectare in Odisha and 50,000 hectare each in Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh as areas with potential...

-Tehelka.com The Sen-Bhagwati ‘debate' on economic policy is focussing on the wrong issues Several things are quite remarkable about the recent debate between Professor Amartya Sen and Professor Jagdish Bhagwati. The first surprise is that such a debate could become a major news item at all, making headlines and filling screen time on news channels, when it is about economic strategies that are normally discussed only in relatively small academic and policy...