20 research outputs found
Compost as counter to global warming
No full textOrganic waste ending up in landfills is one of the major causes of methane generation which is the second highest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide
Impose pollution tax to promote green jobs
No full textPollution tax disincentivises polluting activities while motivating producers and consumers to find sustainable alternatives and incentivising those engaged in green jobs
Food for the Footloose: An Analysis of the Mukhyamantri Dal Bhat Yojana in Jharkhand
No full textThere is a large and growing mobile, unsettled, kitchenless population ‘out there’ which lacks food and nutrition security. Most of them belong to the unorganised sector and many of them face extremely harsh living and working conditions. This footloose population is largely excluded from most social security interventions. Many of them, particularly migrant workers, do not possess documents which enable them to purchase grain from the subsidised public distribution system. They also suffer from much higher rates of undernutrition than the settled populations. However, despite the obvious threat of hunger and food insecurity among the footloose, the subject has largely remained ignored like a blind spot in the academic and policy discourse on hunger, food security and urbanisation.
Policies to set up and operate canteens providing subsidised cooked meals offer a solution for the food and nutrition insecurity faced by the urban poor footloose. However, their precise role and performance has not been studied or understood.
This study of the Mukhyamantri Dal Bhat Yojana in Ranchi city of Jharkhand, therefore, is expected to help to understand the role of a state sponsored subsidised meal programme in addressing food insecurity of the urban footloose poor. Through a comprehensive analysis of the programme, it attempts to understand the performance of the policy as well as understand factors which drive its performance
Does Greater Autonomy among Women Provide the Key to Better Child Nutrition?
No full textWe examine the link between a mother's autonomy – the freedom and ability to think, express, act and make decisions independently – and the nutritional status of her children. We design a novel statistical framework that accounts for cultural and traditional environment, to create a measure of maternal autonomy, a concept that has rarely been examined previously as a factor in children's nutritional outcomes. Using data from the Third Round of the National Family Health Survey for India, supplemented with our qualitative survey, and accounting for "son preference" by limiting analysis to first-born children under 18 months of age, we document that maternal autonomy has a positive impact on the long-term nutritional status of rural children. We find that one standard deviation increase in maternal autonomy score (i) is associated with a 10 percent reduction (representing 300,000 children) in the prevalence of stunting, and (ii) compensates for half of the estimated average decline in Height-for-Age Z-scores Indian children experience in the second six months of life. The findings underscore the importance of women's empowerment in improving children's nutrition during the critical first two years of life, a recognized "window of opportunity" for lifelong health and economic benefits
Lockdown, demonetisation to CAA, farm laws: How hasty policies have killed Indians
No full textThe landmark American movie 12 Angry Men, released in 1957, holds an important lesson for contemporary India. It is an intense courtroom drama in which the fate of a young man charged with murdering his father depends on the verdict of a 12-member jury. As per the judge’s instructions, if there was any reasonable doubt that the accused may not have committed the crime, the jury must pronounce him not guilty
Comparisons of hunger across states: India State Hunger Index
No full textThe results of the India State Hunger Index 2008 highlight the continued overall severity of the hunger situation in India, while revealing the variation in hunger across states within India. It is indeed alarming that not a single state in India is either low or moderate in terms of its index score; most states have a “serious” hunger problem, and one state, Madhya Pradesh, has an “extremely alarming” hunger problem. Although variation exists in index scores of the states, and hence in the ranking of Indian states in relation to other countries, few states perform well in relation to the GHI 2008. Even the best-performing Indian state, Punjab, lies below 33 other developing countries ranked by GHI. Even more alarming is the fact that the worst-performing states in India—Bihar, Jharkhand, and Madhya Pradesh—have index scores similar to countries that are precariously positioned on the GHI 2008 rankings. For instance, Bihar and Jharkhand rank lower than Zimbabwe and Haiti, whereas Madhya Pradesh falls between Ethiopia and Chad. Our analysis of the associations between the ISHI 2008 and state economic indicators shows that the relationship between poverty and hunger is largely as expected—greater ISHI 2008 scores are seen in poorer states, with a few exceptions. Outliers like Kerala, Orissa, and Punjab perform better on the ISHI 2008 than might be expected given their poverty levels, whereas Gujarat, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh perform worse. A closer examination of these states’ past and current investments in social protection, health, and nutrition programs can help inform the debate about policy instruments to protect populations against hunger even in the face of poverty. The lack of a clear relationship between state-level economic growth and hunger, taken along with the relationship between the ISHI 2008 and poverty and incomes, has a number of implications. First, economic growth is not necessarily associated with poverty reduction. Additionally, even if equitable economic growth improves food availability and access, it might not lead immediately to improvements in child nutrition and mortality, for which more direct investments are required to enable rapid reductions. Thus, in addition to wide-scale poverty alleviation, direct investments in improving food availability and access for poor households, as well as direct targeted nutrition and health interventions to improve nutrition and mortality outcomes for young children, will be needed to raise the ISHI scores and rankings of Indian states. Child underweight contributes more than either of the other two underlying variables to the GHI score for India and to the ISHI scores for almost all states in India. Tackling child undernutrition, therefore, is crucially important for all states in India. Achieving rapid reductions in child underweight, however, will require scaling up delivery of evidence-based nutrition and health interventions to all women of reproductive age, pregnant and lactating women, and children under the age of two years. Some economically strong states had rankings on the Nutrition Index that deteriorated when compared with the ISHI 2008, suggesting that it might be important for these states to invest in direct nutrition and poverty alleviation interventions even during sustained economic growth. The design and implementation of policies and programs to improve all three underlying dimensions of the ISHI will need to be strengthened and supported to ensure that hunger is reduced rapidly over time. Although strides are being made on the public health front to ensure sustained reductions in child mortality, improvements in child nutrition are not satisfactory in India. Nutrition programs in India are not effectively delivering evidence-based interventions at scale to vulnerable age groups that need to be reached to ensure rapid reductions in undernutrition. In conclusion, for Indian states to progress along the ISHI, and to ensure that ISHI scores for Indian states are more closely aligned with GHI scores of countries with comparable economic growth, investments will be needed to strengthen agriculture, improve overall food availability and access to all population segments, and to improve child nutrition and mortality outcomes
7.5 Crore Green Jobs? Assessing the Greenness of MGNREGA Work
No full textThe Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) provides ‘sustainable livelihoods’ or ‘green jobs’ to workers engaged in restoring the rural ecology while contributing to ‘sustainable rural development’. While the works constructed under NREGA possess tremendous potential to improve environmental indicators—rise in water levels, carbon dioxide sequestration, improvement in soil quality etc., it is unclear how much of that is actually happening. This study seeks to explore this question in this context. Firstly, the study finds that, on the whole, MGNREGA works are green and the works do ensure an overall improvement in environmental parameters. Secondly, several newly adopted activities (such as the construction of roads, buildings and wells) are actually not 'environmental' and hence, do not necessarily provide 'green jobs'. Despite the massive socio-economic contribution of these works, they can actually cause significant environmental damage. Therefore, it becomes important to balance the 'non-environmental' works with sufficient 'environmental' works. Finally, though this paper attempts to quantify the environmental impacts of MGNREGA works, it is limited by constraints of data availability, time and resources. However, it intends to push for a national effort to develop methodologies for inculcating environmental sensitivity into the planning, design, execution, utilisation and evaluation of MGNREGA works. It is hoped that these exercises would significantly contribute towards the ecological restoration of rural areas by the MGNREGA
Does greater autonomy among women provide the key to better child nutrition?
No full textWe examine the link between a mother’s autonomy - the freedom and ability to think, express, act and make decisions independently - and the nutritional status of her children. We design a novel statistical framework that accounts for cultural and traditional environment, to create a measure of maternal autonomy, a concept that has rarely been examined previously as a factor in children’s nutritional outcomes. Using data from the Third Round of the National Family Health Survey for India, supplemented with our qualitative survey, and accounting for “son preference” by limiting analysis to first-born children under 18 months of age, we document that maternal autonomy has a positive impact on the long-term nutritional status of rural children. We find that one standard deviation increase in maternal autonomy score (i) is associated with a 10 percent reduction (representing 300,000 children) in the prevalence of stunting, and (ii) compensates for half of the estimated average decline in Height-for Age Zscores Indian children experience in the second six months of life. The findings underscore the importance of women’s empowerment in improving children’s nutrition during the critical first two years of life, a recognized “window of opportunity” for lifelong health and economic benefits
Measuring maternal autonomy and its effect on child nutrition in rural India
No full textThis paper examines the link between a mother's autonomy—the freedom and ability to think, express, make decisions and act independently—and the nutritional status of her children. We treat ‘autonomy’ as a latent variable, and design a novel statistical framework to measure this. This method allows us to separate the direct associations of maternal and family characteristics in our model for nutrition, from their indirect associations that work through maternal autonomy. Using data from India, we explore the sensitivity of our estimates to endogeneity caused by sample selection in the presence of son preference. We find: (i) a one standard deviation (SD) higher autonomy score is associated with a 0.16 SD higher height-for-age z-score (HAZ score); and (ii) a 10% lower prevalence of stunting (HAZ < −2 SD). The latter is equivalent to the prevention of approximately 300,000 children stunting, indicating the important role of maternal autonomy
Biological, programmatic and sociopolitical dimensions of child undernutrition in three states in India
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