-Hindustan Times School textbooks in recent decades have frequently become battlegrounds for ideological contestation in India. Most textbook wars are to advance majoritarian perspectives on history and culture. However, a recent very different textbook skirmish broke out about the public and private sectors in healthcare. The story of this ideological clash is bemusing and instructive, illuminating competing perspectives on the nature of education, healthcare and markets in new India. This clash surfaced...

-The Hindu India has the highest number of pneumonia and diarrhoea deaths among children globally, reports the International Vaccine Access Centre (IVAC) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The 2015 annual report of the IVAC reads like a repeat of last year’s report card, despite the progress the country is making to accelerate immunisation. With 2,97,114 deaths, India is once again at the top of the list of countries with...

-The Financial Express A new crop insurance scheme the Modi government is set to roll out shortly seeks to cap the premium paid by farmers at about 3% of the insured value. A new crop insurance scheme the Modi government is set to roll out shortly seeks to cap the premium paid by farmers at about 3% of the insured value, cover a substantial part of the country’s farmland and crop output...

-The Hindu The number of Internet users in India is expected to touch 402 million by December, a 49 per cent jump over last year, making India home to the second largest online user base after china, according to a report released by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International. India, which currently has the third largest Internet user base in the world after china and the U.S., had...

-The Hindu Kuruvai village in Palakkad credited with replacing pesticides with agroecology Kochi (Kerala): The success of a group of farmers in Kuruvai village in Palakkad district’s Vadakkencherry panchayat in cultivating paddy without chemical pesticides has come in for praise from United Nations Environment Programme. It finds a prominent place in a book on replacing highly hazardous pesticides with agroecology brought out by Pesticide Action Network International. The book was released at the...