Non-availability of female teachers, absence of safe drinking water, poor maintenance of sanitation facilities and low awareness is what keeps the young girls in the educationally backward and Muslim-dominated Mewat district of Haryana away from schools, a recently conducted study commissioned as part of the National Women Empowerment Mission, under the aegis of the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development, has found.

Actor Aamir Khan, who has been earning accolades for highlighting social issues through his television programme Satyamev Jayate , will soon be seen spreading awareness about the problem of malnutrition as part of a major publicity campaign by the government.

“The Women and Child Development [WCD] Ministry has planned a major information, education and communication or IEC campaign against malnutrition with the pro bono services of the actor. The campaign will be ready in a month or two,” a senior Ministry official said.

An ambitious plan for poverty eradication is set to benefit thousands of below poverty line households in Bharatpur and make the district poverty-free by 2015. Through a well-planned strategy for self and wage employment generation, the plan would benefit 11,000 BPL families of the total of 49,394 such households in the district during the current financial year.

According to the figures compiled by the Lupin Human Welfare and Research Foundation, which has formulated the poverty eradication plan, the total rural population in the nine blocks of Bharatpur district is 20.54 lakh, which includes the BPL population of 2.46 lakh.

Nutritious diet expert of Department for International Development (DFID), Steves Collin called on Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan here on Thursday.

Days after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described malnutrition as national shame, the Centre’s move to pump in massive resources into hunger-related schemes are pending the Planning Commission’s approval.

The project appraisal and management division (PAMD) of the Planning Commission has objected to women and child development (WCD) ministry’s demand of over `2 lakh crores for restructuring of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme Launched in 1975, the ICDS scheme aims at providing supplementary nutrition to children in the age group of 0-6 years.

Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on Tuesday said the skewed sex ratio among children in Delhi was a matter of concern and her government was working on improving the gender disparity.

The government is likely to announce setting up of a national programme to deal with the danger posed by Japanese Encephalitis (JE) and Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES) on Tuesday.

Officials in the Union health ministry disclosed that the GoM, which is slated to meet on Tuesday, is likely to announce the programme as had in-principle decided of it earlier.

The National Mission for Empowerment of Women will soon establish a state-level resource centre to bring about coordination among the schemes of different government departments to ensure the empowerment of all sections of women.

This was disclosed during a consultative meet and workshop on Operationalisation of NMEW in Assam organised by the ministry of women and child development in collabora

Minister of State (independent charge) for Woman and Child Development and Minister In-charge of Khandwa district Ranjana Baghel launched School chale hum abhiyan and Shala Praveshutsav at Khandwa.

Addressing a programme organised at Anandnagar middle school, Baghel said that the resolution of the Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan to make Madhya Pradesh a golden state would be fulfilled only

SC Asks Addl Solicitor General To File Reply By Friday
New Delhi: The health and women and child development ministries have refused to give an affidavit to the Supreme Court on how many children die of hunger in India every year.

UNICEF says 50% of all the deaths of children aged below five years are from malnutrition. That works out to 2,438 children dying every day for lack of food.