-Down to Earth Our policy makers should move away from the income criterion for estimating poverty and take cognisance of other indicators Amid mounting criticism and heated debates about the poverty line, a challenge has resurfaced to examine whether there could be a single non-monetary criterion of estimating poverty. A poverty line is a monetary cut-off point below which a person is deemed to be poor. Thus, any attempt to measure poverty...

-The Hindu Health activists demand public disclosure of maternal death reviews and the remedial action taken Twenty-two-year-old Kousalya (name changed), a Scheduled Caste woman in a remote village in Karnataka, was in an abusive marriage. She had suffered a late miscarriage in her first pregnancy and had been very careful with seeking antenatal care early in this pregnancy. She had moderate anaemia which was not identified or treated at the taluka hospital....

-The Hindu Overcoming son preference in India remains a daunting challenge as even educated women are prone to it Have women fared better than men, and girls better than boys in the last decade or so? In the din over a dramatic reduction in poverty in the period 2009/10-2011/12 that is unlikely to die down, deep questions about the discrimination and deprivation that women face from the womb to the rest of...

-Economic and Political Weekly     Are Indian statistics on the extent of under-nutrition exaggerated and based on faulty yardsticks? Is there a case for moving away from the World Health Organisation standards? Can "genetics" really explain the low heights and weights among Indian children? Is it a puzzle and does it say something about the Indian estimates that Sub-Saharan Africa shows lower levels of under-nutrition than India though the former suffers...

-Economic and Political Weekly     In his paper Arvind Panagariya argues that the current World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended international growth standards exaggerate the extent of stunting in India. He points out that while the prevalence of stunting by current norms is higher in India than many poorer Sub-Saharan African countries, it has much lower mortality rates than them and a better record of economic growth. He deals his cards deftly, giving...