-The Hindu Economic growth alone is not enough to achieve key Sustainable Development Goals. It must translate into jobs for the poor and marginalised India is the fastest growing large economy in the world today. Despite this, one in every five Indians is poor. Multilateral agencies as well as governments are playing an active role in understanding problems relating to poverty and hunger and finding solutions to them. But these challenges are...

-The Hindu Business Line The NITI Aayog should revive district-level planning in order to implement the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution While the Planning Commission, which was virtually an executive arm of the Union government, stands abolished, the District Planning Committee (DPC), a constitutional institution mandated “to prepare a draft development plan for the district as a whole” with a focus on resource endowments, environmental conservation, infrastructural development and spatial...

-The Hindu The Global TB Report 2016, recently released, has revised the estimates for the tuberculosis (TB) burden in India upwards. The country has 27 per cent of the global burden of incident tuberculosis and 34 per cent of global TB deaths. For the year 2015, the updated estimate of incidence (new and relapse TB cases per year) is 2.8 million cases. India diagnosed and notified 1.7 million incident TB patients...

-Livemint.com India has a ‘serious’ hunger problem with 15.2% of its citizens undernourished and 38.7% of under-five children stunted, says a new report New Delhi: Like most of its south Asian neighbours, India has a “serious” hunger problem with 15.2% of its citizens undernourished and 38.7% of under-five children stunted, said the Global Hunger Index report released by the Washington based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) on Tuesday. According to the report’s...

-Livemint.com Courts are finally protecting individual liberty in prohibition and beef ban cases The politics of alcohol consumption and cow slaughter have, of late, run roughshod over issues of constitutional law and philosophy. The Patna high court’s recent judgement on prohibition in Bihar—especially when read together with the Bombay high court’s earlier beef ban verdict—is a necessary redressal of the balance. These judgements are a nuanced look at how the relationship...