-The Hindu While the economy’s revival is still a work in progress, higher food prices, especially of pulses, are affecting nutritional intake across India. The government is counting on a good monsoon season to spur growth and cool down the prices of essential food items. Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das said on Thursday that the government’s move to raise the minimum support price for pulses is expected to help push up...

-The Hindu As cereal consumption comes down despite higher output, India needs to ramp up production of pulses to meet the nutritional requirements of the population. Since the onset of the Green Revolution in the late 1960s, India has been treading on a path towards self-sufficiency in food. The achievements have remained highly skewed towards wheat and rice on account of technological as well as policy support towards these two crops. With...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government wants to fortify not just mid-day meals in school for children, but many other staples that Indians eat. The government, after proposing to supply fortified ready-to-eat packaged meals for children in anganwadi centres, is now mulling a plan for mass fortification of several staple food items on the lines of iodine-fortified salt. Prime Minister Modi last week heard a presentation from secretaries of the ministries...

-The Hindu As of 2005-06, India had 62 million stunted children, accounting for a third of the world’s burden of stunting. Indian states have seen some improvements in child nutrition over the last decade, the first official data in over a decade shows, but over one in three children is still stunted, and over one in five underweight. As of 2005-6, India had 62 million stunted children, accounting for a third of the...

  A French journalist once wrote: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Perhaps the same can be said about nutritional status of children in West Bengal at present in comparison to the past. At the time when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, was entertaining private capital in Singur and Nandigram, the rate of undernutrition was quite high in his state. A little less than...