'India needs to align agri policy with nutrition'

India needs to align agriculture policy with nutrition goals as it is facing the problem of malnutrition, member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) Shamika Ravi has said.
She also said that India needs a separate regulatory body for nutrition monitoring.
Ravi is also a senior fellow at Brooking's India.
Talking about labour reforms, she told PTI that there is a "great degree of casualisation due to new business models like Ola and Uber, so labour laws of the land has to evolve".
India is a labour surplus country, she said, adding that "we have started behaving like a first world country. When you raise MNREGA wages, you also make labour costly for SME sector ...We can't politicise sound economic policy."

Ravi also stressed upon the need of raising productivity as well as increasing investments in health and education sectors.

Stating that poverty does not just reduce with economic growth, she said: "We need to grow and redistribute."
Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had also stressed upon the need of working towards concrete objectives to reduce stunting, under-nutrition, low birth weight and anaemia.
He had emphasised that visible and adequate results should be seen by 2022, the 75th birth anniversary of the country's Independence.
According to a recent Niti Aayog report, nearly every third child in India is under undernourished.
Headed by NITI Aayog member Bibek Debroy, the EAC-PM also includes NITI Aayogs Principal Adviser Ratan Watal as its member and economists Surjit Bhalla, Rathin Roy and Ashima Goyal as part-time members.