-TheWire.in Even as schemes have received minimal allocations, this budget signals an important shift in the political narrative. Gone is the focus on jobs, skills, aspirations and empowerment. Arun Jaitley had a difficult choice to make this budget. Maintain fiscal prudence or respond to growing demands for public expenditure in light of growing rural distress and at the same time keeping an eye on 2019. He did this today with great panache....
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Another woman dies of undernutrition and exhaustion in Jharkhand after denial of PDS rations for four months due to failure of Aadhaar-based biometric authentication
-Right to Food Campaign On 23 January 2018, 30-year-old Lukhi Murmu of Dhawadangal village of Hiranpur block in Pakur (Jharkhand) succumbed to prolonged undernutrition and exhaustion. She lived with her 14-year old sister Phulin in extreme poverty. Their meals usually comprised solely of rice and they even had to sleep hungry at times. The sisters’ deprivation worsened over the last four months when they were unable to access their ration from...
More »Budget 2018: India's Healthcare System Needs More Money and an Urgent Overhaul -Dipa Sinha
-TheWire.in This is the last full budget of the present government and the last opportunity for it to demonstrate its commitment to India’s health and nutrition. Slow improvements in basic indicators of maternal and child mortality, double burden of communicable as well as non-communicable diseases, high out-of-pocket expenditure, a failing public sector and heavily commercialised private sector characterise the healthcare crisis in India. The year 2017 saw a number of incidents in the...
More »User Charges Onslaught on Public Health Services -Ravi Duggal & Nitin Jadhav
-Economic and Political Weekly Healthcare as a public good should be available free of charge at the point of service delivery. This was the case across India until a flurry of reforms from the early 1990s onwards notified user charges for various health services in public health facilities. Since then, public expenditure on healthcare has seen a decline from a high of 1.5% of gross domestic product in the mid-1980s to...
More »Aadhaar: When the Poor Get Left Out -Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri
- The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy Aadhaar's principal goals were to end fraud and reach welfare to the poorest. But in practice it has achieved neither. The claimed elimination of bogus cards has been found to be exaggerated. On the other hand, the insistence on the Aadhaar card has led to the brutal exclusion from welfare of the very poor and the homeless — for reasons such as...
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