-Frontline A survey conducted by the Women and Child Development Ministry and UNICEF in 28 States and Delhi presents a dismal picture of crucial maternal and child health indicators. ONE OF the success stories that successive governments at the Centre have regularly narrated is the improvement in maternal and child health indicators, including coverage of various facilities and services that directly or indirectly affect the health and well-being of these cohort...
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Socio Economic Caste Census: Has It Ignored Too Many Poor Households? -NC Saxena
-Economic and Political Weekly A survey to identify who the poor are and how many are actually poor is necessary if programmes and benefits targeted at the needy are to reach them. The Socio Economic Caste Census, of which partial results have been published, was intended to do this. Yet, even a cursory look at the figures indicates that they call for a willing suspension of disbelief. N C Saxena (naresh.saxena@gmail.com) was...
More »Spare Some Change -Lola Nayar, Arindam Mukherjee, Arushi Bedi, Pragya Singh & Pavithra S Rangan
-Outlook Social spends have been cut, rural India is in crisis, have we got the growth story wrong? When journalist P. Sainath met him, Jain saab, 45, was the ‘head of departments’ cum sports officer and principal of the Government P.G College, Alirajpur, Madhya Pradesh. The meeting was recorded in Sainath’s magnum opus, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, in 1995. As Sainath wrote then: “The schooling system, despite many stupid experiments,...
More »Chuck the BPL card -Mihir Shah
-The Indian Express SECC opens the door to step away from the poverty line as a criterion for government benefits. The Government of India has just released data from the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011. It is perhaps the most ambitious exercise of this kind ever conducted in human history. The SECC 2011 has three parts: census of rural India, conducted by the Union ministry of rural development (MoRD), census...
More »Govt. shows laxity in battle against malnutrition
The fourteenth Public Accounts Committee (2014-15) report, submitted to the 16th Lok Sabha in April this year, has found that despite various interim orders issued by the Supreme Court from time to time (based on a writ petition that was filed by People’s Union for Civil Liberties in April, 2001), the Government of India has failed to universalize the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme. This means India has to...
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