-The Indian Express Progress on non-communicable diseases should not be benchmarked against sustainable development goals. In the last week of September, India’s health ministry received the prestigious UN Inter-Agency Task Force Award for “outstanding contribution to the achievement of NCD (Non-Communicable Diseases) related SDG targets”. At the same time, a Lancet paper by the monitoring group, NCD Countdown 2030, contended that India will fall short of the NCD targets pertaining to SDGS....

-Livemint.com Odisha is a front-runner in women’s land ownership, much of it owing to government policies from the 1980s. But has ownership led to empowerment? Surrounded by sun-drenched paddy fields interspersed with jackfruit and banana trees, Sanakusupadu is a hamlet in Odisha’s tribal-dominated district of Rayagada. Here, almost every married woman owns land. No matter how small the holding, land documents of the 62 households in this village bear the names of the...

-The Hindu Conflicts, climate change are main hurdles in meeting development goals The number of hungry people in the world has risen for the first time in more than a decade, according to a United Nations report released on Wednesday. There are now approximately 38 million more undernourished people in the world, rising from 777 million in 2015 to 815 million in 2016, the year for which the latest statistics are available. According to...

-Hindustan Times Increasing rates of girls’ education, proactive government investments in adolescent girls, and strong public messaging around the illegality of child marriage and the harm it causes attributed to the shift. From one in four to approximately one in five, child marriages have seen a decline world over in the past 10 years, a Unicef report released on Monday said. The proportion of women who were married as children decreased by 15%...

-Factchecker.in With a score of 38.6 out of 100, India’s performance on health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Index is the worst among BRICS nations. SDGs are universal targets including ending poverty, hunger and inequality, improving access to health and education among others for all countries by 2030. Created by the international research collaboration Global Burden of Disease, the SDG index calculates the performance of countries on 37 health-related targets of SDGs including under-five...