-The Hindu It is imperative to promote community-based care rather than relying only on hospital services The deaths of 154 children in Bihar due to acute encephalitis syndrome (AES) has laid bare the precarious capacity of the State’s healthcare apparatus to handle outbreaks. AES has been linked to two factors: litchi consumption by starving children and a long, ongoing heat wave. As promises of bolstering the health infrastructure are being made, it...

-The Hindu Business Line To tackle homelessness, the government should provide better incentives to developers to provide affordable housing Food, clothing and shelter are three basic human needs. Out of the three, shelter remains beyond the reach of 1.77 million people in India, accounting for 0.15 per cent of the nation’s population (Census 2011). Rights groups, however, say that the actual figure is at least three times higher. Consequently, a large number...

-The Indian Express The nation awaits the new born DNEP’s janmakundali to reveal its future. But we already know one of its possible epitaphs: It was just too good to be true. What does the new National Education Policy (NEP) have to say about the future of Indian higher education? Before trying to answer this question, it is necessary to spend a moment or two on the roughly 500-page draft of...

-TheWire.in "I think the fact that the whole [NSSO] exercise began with a fundamental premise of keeping it comparable, that has been forgotten." The fierce debate over India’s unemployment figures came to a head last week, when a jobs data report by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) was finally made public. This report has been a source of contention ever since two members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC)  resigned allegedly...

-The Indian Express To fulfil the constitutional requirement, reservation must be based on a rigorous identification of economic backwardness. The introduction of the 124th constitutional amendment that provides the possibility of quotas for the “economically weaker sections” (EWS) has rekindled the debate on reservations. These quotas diverge from reservation policies for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other socially and educationally backward classes, by jettisoning caste or community identity as the...