The Centre proposes to move at least 250 amendments to the National Food Security Bill when it is tabled in Parliament during the current Budget session.

The Bill, which seeks to give subsidised foodgrains to identified beneficiaries, will take into consideration the recommendations made by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Food. Disclosing this, Right to Food activists said that during their meeting with the Minister of State for Food K.V. Thomas, they were given the assurance that the 2.5 crore Antyodaya Anna Yojana beneficiaries will continue to get 35 kg of concessional foodgrains.

India has registered higher infant and child mortality rates than Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Further the country’s position on the measure of the percentage of underweight and severely underweight children during the period 2006-10 was more than twice than that in the Sub-Saharan African region.

This was revealed in the Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s performance audit of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) Scheme — Union Ministry of Women and Child Development’s flagship programme — that was tabled in Parliament on Tuesday. The report contains results of performance audit conducted between 2006-07 and 2010-11.

The Integrated Child Development Scheme came in for praise from Finance Minister P Chidamabaram during his budget speech for having spent its entire budget allocation — it had got a 50 per cent hik

Jharkhand has ranked third among all states in implementation of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) and delivery of services and monitoring.

Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh has urged Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram to sanction a special economic package of Rs 7,565 crore to tide over the difficult financial situation created in the state due to the reportedly faulty recommendation of the 13th Finance Commission.

Virbhadra Singh met the Union minister in New Delhi and drew his attention to the fact that the commission had misjudged and under-assessed committed liabilities of the state government, as a result of which the state received a much less revenue deficit grant.

Survey has identified 282 malnourished childrenin 26 slums of the district

World Vision, a development and advocacy organisation, has implemented a project to tackle child malnutrition in Coimbatore since January. It has been taken up in collaboration with Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), a Central Government-sponsored social welfare scheme. The organisation, which has consultative status with UNESCO and partnerships with UN agencies such as United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and World Health Organisation (WHO), undertook a survey in 26 urban slums in the district, which revealed a child malnutrition rate of 45 per cent, according to K. Vetriselvan John, Programme Manager (Coimbatore), World Vision.

New Delhi: The UPA is set to redraft the National Food Security Bill with greater benefits than what the government had earlier offered or the parliamentary standing committee had recently recommended.

The move comes after the intervention of the Congress high command to ensure that the bill does not fall short of the benchmark the National Advisory Council (NAC) had once set for UPA’s grand scheme.

JAIPUR: One tablet a week could decrease the prevalence of anaemia among adolescents in the state. These tablets would soon be distributed to school children from Class 6 to 12 in government schools.

Medical health and family welfare department is likely to introduce the weekly iron and folic acid supplementation (WIFS) national programme for adolescents within seven days. The preparation for its launch is already complete. A meeting of all reproduction and child health officers was held in this regard on Friday.