Nutrition, not opium.

"The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday (yesterday) raised India's growth forecast for 2024-25 to 7% from 6.8% on the back of improving private consumption, particularly in rural India. The IMF left unchanged its estimate for a 6.5% growth in Asia's third largest economy's gross domestic product (GDP) in the 2025-26 financial year, it said in the World Economic Outlook." Reuters. An analysis of the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey data shows that "56% of the population had three meals a day while 43% had just two. A break-up by location and gender shows that while rural areas do better, there is not much difference between men and women when it comes to the number of meals." HT. "The majority of Indians cannot afford a healthy meal and millions die every year due to diseases that are directly linked to poor diet, a recent survey showed." The report said that "a healthy meal becomes unaffordable if it exceeds 63% of a person's income." Mint. "India has the second highest number of kids who did not receive any vaccine at all in 2023, 1.6 million, just after Nigeria with 2.1 million 'zero dose children', according to Unicef." "The number of completely unvaccinated children (zero dose) is slightly up from last year (by 600,000 from 13.9 million to 14.5 million) and is still 1.7 million higher than in 2019." TOI. That could be a precursor for a lot of mortality, morbidity and expense for poor people in case of a preventable epidemic. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation increased by 5.08% in June over 4.87% increase last year. Food inflation jumped by 9.36%. ET. Wholesale prices (WPI) rose by 3.4% in June while wholesale prices of food jumped 10.9%. Vegetables rose by 38.8% and pulses by 21.6% in June. TOI. "A survey carried out by LocalCircles, a community social media platform shows that six out of 10 are spending 50% or more every week on vegetables as compared to previous months." ET. We are so proud that India is the world's fifth largest economy with a GDP of $3.942 trillion, above the UK in sixth with $3.502 trillion and France in seventh with $3.132 trillion, but the GDP per capita of UK is $51.07 thousand and that of France is $47.36 thousand compared to our miserable $2.73 thousand. Forbes. "The cumulative impact of the GST roll-out, note-ban along with the pandemic on informal sector has been 4.3% of FY23 GDP or about Rs 11.5 trillion, shows an analysis." TNIE. "Modi has presided over the highest level of unemployment in 45 year," and labor economist Santosh Mehrotra said that "youth unemployment (15-29 years) has doubled to 12% in 2022-23 compared to 2011-12. He reckons the actual figure of youth unemployment is much higher as India treats a very large number of people (about 90 million) as employed when they are actually unpaid workers in family owned enterprises with low productivity. No other country follows this methodology and even the ILO does not treat unpaid family workers as employed," wrote MK Venu. The BJP lost in the temple seat of Ayodhya where Mr Modi had inaugurated the new Ram Temple. Mint. Ten years of drugging people with the opium of religion (Marquette University) while they are dying of diseases due to malnutrition and lack of vaccination. Some Indians at least are refusing to swallow opium. Demanding jobs instead.