-The Hindu The Draft National Health Policy 2015 fails to tackle head-on the core problem of the Indian health system: its management, administration and overall governance structure The Draft National Health Policy of 2015 released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, is a comprehensive document. So comprehensive, in fact, that it says too little by saying too much. A National Heath Policy is commonly read as a...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The NDA government, which came riding on a huge anti-corruption wave wiping out Congress last year, has dropped crucial amendments to the Prevention of Corruption Act that would have ensured India ratifying the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC). Sources said the government has not considered incorporating Article 12 and 16 of the UNCAC in the proposed amendments to the Prevention of Corruption (PC) Act likely to...

-The Hindu The challenge for the Modi government is to evaluate what works in development programming before making large spending decisions Governments in India have always launched big-ticket social development programmes with ambitious goals. The Narendra Modi government is no exception. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan aims to make India open defecation-free by 2019. The Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana's financial inclusion programme set a target of opening 10 crore bank accounts by January...

-The Hindu Business Line Though migration of labour from the east has helped revive the plantations in southern India, questions remain on the long-term implications, Vishwanath Kulkarni reports As the harvest season starts in Coorg, Karnataka, coffee planter MC Kariappa has a lot of issues to contend with - productivity, weather and, the biggest worry of all in recent times, paucity of labourers. So when a dozen labourers from Assam landed at...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Here's why drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) breeds freely in Mumbai: Patients don't get appropriate medication. A new study collating information from eight hospitals and treatment centres across Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai found patients were given drugs that they were resistant to. The study, published in PLOS ONE medical journal recently, looked at 340 patients suffering from multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB between 2005 and 2013. "We found only 29.4% of...