Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : Food security — of APL, BPL & IPL
Is 35 kg of rice at Rs. 3 a kilo (for a section of the population) food security? Are there no other determinants of food security? Like health, nutrition, livelihoods, jobs, food prices? Can we even delink the fuel price hike from discussions on food security? Or from the wilful gutting of the public distribution system? Or from the havoc wrought by the ever-growing futures trade in wheat, pulses, edible oils and more?
The truth is the government seeks ways to spend less and less on the very food security it talks about. Hunger is defined not by how many people suffer it, but by how many the government is willing to pay for. Hence the endless search for a lower BPL figure. To the government's great dismay, all three officially-constituted committees have turned up estimates of poverty higher than its own. Even the Tendulkar committee, closest to the ruling elite's worldview, raises the estimate of rural poverty to 42 per cent. (On a weak and fragile basis, it is true. But still higher than the government's count.)
The BPL Expert group headed by N.C. Saxena raises that to around 50 per cent. While the report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector states on its first page that 836 million Indians (77 per cent of our people) live on Rs. 20 a day or less. Accepting that, for instance, would mean a few thousand crores more in spending on the hungry. The official line is simple. Since we cannot afford to feed all the hungry, there must only be as many hungry as we can afford to feed.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Tracking Hunger
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Women in the poorest countries are 300 times more likely to die in pregnancy
At the same time, a child born in a developing country is almost 14 times more likely to die in the first month than a child born in a developed country, UNICEF's "State of the World's Children" report said.
"The younger a girl is when she becomes pregnant, the greater the health risks," said the report released in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s, the report said.
The child of a mother under age 18 has a 60 percent greater risk of dying in its first year than an infant born to a mother older than 19, the report said.
Ninety-five percent of the world's maternal deaths are in Africa and Asia, with 50 percent of the global total in sub-Saharan Africa and 35 percent in South Asia.
Those regions areas are also where child marriage is most prevalent, the report said.
The number of maternal deaths worldwide exceeds 500,000, including about 70,000 girls and young women age 15 to 19, the report said.
At least 9.2 million children died in 2007 before reaching the age of 5, down from 9.7 million in 2006. source
