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For years, India has been struggling to deal with the double burden of undernutrition and obesity. India has peculiar nutritional status where undernutrition and overnutrition coexist among urban population. While undernutrition has given rise to vitamin deficiencies, anaemia and stunted growth, overnutrition is the reason behind the rise of non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular disease, cancer, hypertension and diabetes mellitus, among urban population. The National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau (NNMB) has been keeping a track of India’s nutritional status. To understand the current nutritional status of urban population in India, a study was conducted between 2015 and 2016 and the report was released on September 26, 2017. Rajasthan, Kerala, Gujarat, New Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry have the highest obesity rates in the country with 44 per cent of adult women and 33 per cent of men being obese. New Delhi, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala lead in hypertension rate with 31.1 per c...

Students at the JPM Senior Secondary School for the Blind in New Delhi had some exciting news recently. They now have intricately carved Braille maps that depict a gamut of information provided with the help of legends, dots, bars and symbols. Earlier, blind children used to learn geography, but they were not exposed to maps. Now thanks to the Kolkata-based National Atlas & Thematic Mapping Organisation (NATMO), India has, for the first time, indigenously developed Braille maps. This breakthrough could change the way 52 million visually impaired people and 0.27 million blind children in India study geography. The atlas is updated till 2011-2012, and was released by the Union Minister of Science & Technology, Harsh Vardhan on February 10. “Maps are an integral part of geography lessons in school. Realising the lack of efficient maps catering to the visually challenged in India, NATMO, introduced a cost-effective and an indigenous method of producing Braille maps,” says Tapa...