-The Hindu The Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana was introduced to provide partial wage compensation during pregnancy, but various issues plague its implementation The latest official figures indicate that India is well short of meeting the Millennium Development Goals that pledged to reduce the country's maternal mortality ratio (MMR) by three quarters and the infant mortality rate (IMR) by two-thirds. The Sample Registration System (SRS), 2013, records MMR at 167 per 1,00,000...
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No one’s children -Neerja Chowdhury
-The Indian Express The most important priority for any government in India today should be the health and nutrition of its children. This is a matter of emergency. In many ways, it is more important than even education. Why then has an otherwise sensitive finance minister slashed the budget in the health and nutrition sectors so badly? The budgetary allocations on health and nutrition programmes for children, who are the most vulnerable,...
More »Land acquisition: First, sow the seeds of security among farmers -Abhijit Banerjee
-Hindustan Times Many years ago, Jagdish Bhagwati, a very distinguished economist long before he became one of the patron saints of the NDA, published an important paper on what he called Directly Unproductive Activities or DUP. These bore a close relation to what his friend and well-known South Asia scholar, Anne Krueger, had called rent-seeking activities in some slightly earlier work. Both made the important point that the social cost of...
More »Farmers' Rights to Seeds Issues in the Indian Law -Parameswaran Prajeesh
-Economic and Political Weekly While the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act 2001 is a progressive piece of legislation that recognises farmers' rights to seed, it demands payment of an annual maintenance fee by the farmers to protect the varieties which they have been cultivating and conserving for years, only because these varieties have been brought under legal protection through national legislation. Parameswaran Prajeesh (prajeesh@mssrf.res.in) is a researcher with the...
More »Enough cereals, but need to import oil, pulses: Centre to Supreme Court
-PTI NEW DELHI: The Centre has told the Supreme Court that though the country has become self sufficient in production of cereals, it is dependent on imports to bridge the gap between domestic production and demand of edible oil and pulses. Responding to a PIL on increasing farmer suicides in the country, the Ministry of Agriculture said in an affidavit, "India has not only ensured self-sufficiency in most of the agricultural crops...
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