-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Taking note of the issues raised in HT’s Sick Hospitals investigation, Delhi health minister Satyendar Jain on Friday promised to bring primary healthcare to the doorstep of every Delhiite with neighbourhood clinics, diagnostic labs and free ambulance services. “Currently, Delhi hospitals score two on (a scale of) 10,” admitted Jain. “Give me two years. They will at least score a six on 10. HT should do a follow-up...

-PTI WASHINGTON: India's rural employment guarantee programme MNREGA has been ranked as the world's largest public works programme, providing social security net to almost 15 per cent of the country's population, World Bank has said. India is among the five middle-income countries running the world's largest social safety net programmes, said a World Bank Group's report 'The State of Social Safety Nets 2015'. "The world's five largest social safety net programmes are all...

-The Hindu Although the SECC’s objectives are not likely to be met, it is a big step towards providing accurate information on the well-being of the people. The release of data for rural households from the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) is only the latest step in India’s tortured history of trying to count its poor. The idea behind the SECC was technocratic. Commissioned by the United Progressive Alliance in 2011,...

-The Times of India In all the buzz about Narendra Modi's promotion of #selfiewithdaughter, what seems to have been overlooked is one bar baric form of discrimination that millions of daughters continue to suffer in this day and age. It's child marriage, which affects the upbringing of daughters and pushes them into situations long before they are physically and mentally capable of handling them. The country has displayed few signs of...

Is the Government stepping back from its responsibility under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) by giving technical reasons? Civil society organizations, which struggled to enact the Right to Food legislation, doubt that this may be the case. It has been alleged recently by several civil society activists that the Government is rolling back the Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY), which is meant for food security of the extremely poor households,...