-The New Indian Express Yet another damning report on malnutrition among children in urban slums has made headlines. A study conducted by the Indian NGO Child Rights and You on early childhood has revealed that children living in slums suffer from malnutrition, resulting in underweight and stunted growth. Though the numbers vary from one city to another, there’s very little to cheer about. The percentage of underweight children ranged from 33...

-The Hoot A decade of RTI, Part II---How many Indians are using their right to information? Studies suggest that the figure of users has yet to cross one per cent of the population in a given year, but there could be substantial under-reporting. More than eight million Right to Information applications are being made now, 10 years after the law was introduced. That’s the figure that was given by Aruna Roy of...

-The Hindu Business Line Government surveys on out-of-school children are gross underestimations. The Census numbers, however, are a shocker Census 2011 showed that about 32 million children aged between 6 and 13 years have never attended any educational institution, even though government estimates of out-of-school children show substantially lower numbers. Given that out-of-school numbers consist of both children who dropped out and those who never attended school, it raises some questions over...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The current spike in pulse prices could have been anticipated, but India's cereal-centric food security policies emphasize rice and wheat while dis-incentivizing the production of pulses despite clear trends that show a declining preference for cereals. Even though India's dependency on imported pulses grew as imports rose from 2.7 million tonnes in 2010-11 to over four million tonnes this year, minimum support price-driven procurement and the...

-The Hindu Business Line Will help policymakers, analysts calculate impact of decisions on real-time job market The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation is set to launch quarterly and annual surveys on employment. “We are in the process of getting administrative clearances. The methodology has already been finalised and the surveys should be launched soon,” said TCA Anant, the country’s Chief Statistician. Once this is done, it is expected to bridge a major deficit...