-Down to Earth While total allocations to Union budget 2021-22 saw an increase of 14.5%, the share for children declined by 10.8% compared to 2020 The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has dealt a serious blow to the Indian economy. The economic slowdown has aggravated poverty, disrupted public provisioning for children’s welfare, exacerbated existing gaps in availability, access and utilisation of services. It has multiplied challenges for children from marginalised communities. Healthcare, nutrition,...

-Livemint.com Much of the increased spending will go towards preventive aspects of healthcare, with the health ministry by itself not gaining much even after the pandemic. India needs to do a whole lot more to strengthen its health infrastructure In her Budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a 137% increase in allocations on “health and well-being" for 2021-22, to ₹2.24 trillion. Embedded in that declaration was a definitional change: it also...

-The Hindu With better governance, northern States can bring their health systems on a par with southern States In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been vociferous demands to strengthen the country’s public health system. Many erudite articles have stressed the need to revamp the system quickly so that we are better prepared to handle such emergencies in the future. Once the present crisis is over, however, public health will...

-TheWire.in ASHA workers and other community healthcare workers have experienced extra working hours, loss of pay and social apathy during the pandemic. Walking into 2021, if there was one positive to be identified with the large-scale outbreak of a pandemic in 2020 in India, and the rest of the developing world, it would have been this: a primary focus given by most governments and their executive agencies to improve healthcare services and...

-The Indian Express Raising the diet of our people from subsistence level to higher levels of nourishment by overcoming the triple deficit is the only way to improve the nutritional indicators of our population — amongst children, adolescents and adults. It is nearly a month since the first phase of the NFHS-5 survey was published. While we await a response from the government or any policy-making authority, several articles by public health/policy...