Monitoring for Nutrition Results in ICDS: Translating Vision into Action

This article focuses on the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), India's largest nutrition and early child development programme. It describes the political, organisational and technical challenges to building and sustaining an outcomes?oriented approach to nutrition monitoring in India. We show that the environment is conducive to strengthening nutrition programme monitoring and evaluation. Political commitment is growing, financial allocations have increased and there have been a number of reforms to strengthen the ICDS monitoring systems, but weaknesses remain. The article analyses seven technical challenges to improving the outcomes?orientation of ICDS and suggests steps that could be taken to improve monitoring

Planning a 'slum free' Trivandrum: housing upgrade and the rescaling of urban governance in India

This paper examines how India’s national urban development agenda is reshaping relationships between national, State and city-level governments. JNNURM, the flagship programme that heralded a new era of urban investment in India, contained a range of key governance aspirations: linking the analysis of urban poverty to city-level planning, developing holistic housing solutions for the urban poor, and above all empowering Urban Local Bodies to re-balance relationships between State and city-level governments in favour of the latter. Here, we trace JNNURM’s implementation in Kerala’s capital city, Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram), where the city’s decentralised urban governance structure and use of ‘pro-poor’ institutions to implement housing upgrade programmes could have made it an exemplar of success. In practice, Trivandrum’s ‘city visioning’ exercises and the housing projects it has undertaken have fallen short of JNNURM’s lofty goals. The contradictions between empowering cities and retaining centralised control embedded within this national programme, and the unintended city-level consequences of striving for JNNURM funding success, have reshaped urban governance in ways not envisaged within policy. As a result, JNNURM has been important in rescaling governance relationships through three interlinked dynamics of problem framing, technologies of governance and the scalar strategy of driving reform ‘from above’ that together have ensured the national state’s continued influence over the practices of urban governance in India

Large?scale Investments in Agriculture in India

Public investment in agriculture has significant poverty?reducing effects. This article attempts to analyse trends in agricultural investments in India between the 1950s and the 2000s. It argues that public investment and expenditure on agriculture in India have grown only slowly and have not decisively increased even after more than 60 years of independence. While public capital formation and expenditure do show a moderate rise in the 2000s, a revival of India's agricultural growth requires a far greater thrust to public spending. Major and medium irrigation projects require special attention, as irrigation is instrumental not just in raising yields, but also the number of days of employment for labourers. Increasing public investment in agricultural research and extension is central to bridging the yield gap that persists. Formal credit flows to agriculture have to specifically target small and marginal farmers, and emphasis should move away from generating agricultural growth by channelling credit to agri?business firms and corporate players in agriculture. If India's second green revolution has to contribute to an accelerated reduction of poverty, hunger and malnourishment, it undoubtedly has to be a state?led project

The extent, nature and distribution of child poverty in India

Despite a long history, research on poverty has only relatively recently examined the issue of child poverty as a distinct topic of concern. This article examines how child poverty and well-being are now conceptualized, defined and measured, and presents a portrait of child poverty in India by social and cultural groups, and by geographic area. In December 2006, the UN General Assembly adopted a definition of child poverty which noted that children living in poverty were deprived of (among other things) nutrition, water and sanitation facilities, access to basic health care services, shelter and education. The definition noted that while poverty hurts every human being ‘it is most threatening and harmful to children, leaving them unable to enjoy their rights, to reach their full potential and to participate as full members of the society’. Researchers have developed age-specific and gender-sensitive indicators of deprivation which conform to the UN definition of child poverty and which can be used to examine the extent and nature of child poverty in low and middle-income countries. These new methods have ‘transformed the way UNICEF and many of its partners both understood and measured the poverty suffered by children’ (UNICEF, 2009). This article uses these methods and presents results of child poverty in India based on nationally representative household survey data for India

Understanding Community Colleges in the Indian Context

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136494/1/cc20242.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136494/2/cc20242_am.pd