-The Business Standard States need to create alternative marketing structures for farm produce since middlemen also provide vital services that are otherwise unavailable to the farmer   One of the issues often raised in the context of high food inflation is the pressing need to change the Agricultural Produce Market Committees (APMC), the marketing boards established by state governments. The earlier United Progressive Alliance government had asked the Congress-ruled states to remove fruit...

-The Hindu   An improvement in sanitation and cleanliness will eliminate much of the difference in malnutrition between India and the rest of the world, and across Indian States Historically the greatest advances in longevity and mortality reduction have come not from treatment of individual disease but from public health. This includes modern drainage and sewerage systems (sewage treatment plants), drinking water systems that produce and deliver disease-free water and solid waste disposal...

-The Indian Express This year's edition of the Human Development Report contains a set of practical recommendations The 2014 Human Development Report (HDR) draws attention to the urgent need to address human vulnerabilities and build resilience as conditions for accelerating and sustaining progress. Human insecurity stems from not only low and uncertain incomes, but from many other sources, including inadequate access to health, food and shelter, unsafe environments, and inadequate protection of...

-The Indian Express Human Development Report: Spending 4% of GDP can ensure social security net. India may have little to feel proud about in the findings of UNDP's Human Development Report for 2014, but the good news is that with ongoing rural employment and school education programmes and some serious discussions on universal healthcare over the last couple of years, it is moving in the right direction. The report gives a six-point...

-Deccan Herald The Green Revolution has changed life in Indian villages, but the main beneficiaries were the landlords. Daily labourers remain poor and marginalised. The limits of using ever more fertiliser and pesticides are becoming apparent. Many farmers are confused because extension services want them to reconsider practices they were told to abandon not that long ago. A member of the Santal tribe, an Adivasi community, assesses things from the village perspective. Since independence...