-The Hindu Study says 10 per cent of Rajasthan's population migrates seasonally in search of work Jaipur: As many as 5.79 million people in Rajasthan, or 10 per cent of the State's population, migrates seasonally in search of employment, says a new study on migration and labour. Approximately 4.38 million households thus send a person or more to other States in search of work seasonally, it adds. The number of migrants per household...

-The Week Shambhu Kumar, 8, quite liked his job as a domestic help in a small town in Assam. He had to mind two children nearly his age, keep an eye on the ducks and be available for chores all day. It wasn't too hard, and he was well fed, too, though he missed his grandmother, a tea garden labourer. One day, some women from the state education department came to the...

-The Hindu Ignoring hunger and malnutrition will have significant costs to any country's development. Nutrition improvement has both intrinsic and instrumental value One of the disappointments in the post-reform period in India has been the slow progress in the reduction of malnutrition, especially with reference to the underweight among children. In fact, the rate of change in the percentage of underweight children has been negligible in the period 1998-99 to 2005-06; the...

-The Indian Express While the new government has spoken about taking policy measures to address the needs of India's young population, nearly 10 crore of the elderly - citizens above 60 years of age - are generally neglected in policymaking. The latest Census data report that 15 per cent of the elderly live alone, mainly because of the nuclearisation of the family. As longevity is increasing and women tend to live...

-The Business Standard Make schemes mobile and portable, by focusing on people and not products India spends close to four per cent of its GDP on an alphabet soup of welfare schemes and subsidies - it has become a welfare state before becoming a developed state. Despite its significant costs, India's welfare system is neither comprehensive nor very effective - subject to huge leakages and corruption, and not well knit into...