-Live Mint The Planning Commission’s decision to not include healthcare in the list of essential entitlements such as education and food comes after an expert group recommended exactly the opposite. The group was to evaluate the role of the state as a healthcare provider, and it came to the unexceptionable conclusion that public health infrastructure should be strengthened to provide better and more affordable healthcare to all Indians. However, the Planning...

-The Times of India   Can Jairam Ramesh become the next president of the World Bank? Unlikely, but in the steady drumbeat of the demand that the next World Bank president must come from the developing world, the rural development minister’s name is being heard alongside several other competent names from the wrong side of the poverty divide.    An independent website, worldbankpresident.org, which is running a poll on who should be the next...

In climate change talks, the countries need to think equity differently Just before the BASIC ministerial meeting on climate change in Delhi this week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stressed on “equity” in climate change talks and said economic growth should not harm the environment. Although the BASIC countries — Brazil, South Africa, India and China — are growing, making them a powerful voice in global economy, they still view themselves as...

The huge expenditure on the food bill, with the attendant leakages, could well make fiscal recovery impossible In the first part of this article, we have estimated the actual cost of implementing the food security bill in its current form. In this part, we now examine the fiscal sustainability of the same. The current state of the revenue and expenditure trends of the Central government (refer table) show that while revenue...

You know your negotiating strategy is in trouble when countries ranging as far as Norway in the developed world to partners like South Africa and neighbours like Bangladesh start quoting Gandhi and Nehru back to you. Two months ago, this was the unfortunate situation Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan had to face at the Durban conference on climate change. That she managed, through a passionate last-minute speech, to ensure that all was...