After the outbreak of COVID-19 in China during early January this year and its dissemination globally within a few days, health experts have suggested ways to check its spread exponentially among the rest of the population. In the age of internet connectivity, work-from-home and self-isolation have been advised as solutions to ensure social distancing and avoid large-scale social gatherings. Experts have asked governments and private enterprises to keep people at...

-The Telegraph It will be available free to below-poverty-line patients and at a cost to the rest The Union health ministry has decided to provide peritoneal dialysis, a home-based alternative to haemodialysis that typically requires thrice weekly hospital visits, to patients with end-stage kidney disease across India under the National Dialysis Programme. It will be available free to below-poverty-line patients and at a cost to the rest, just as haemodialysis is under the...

-The Hindu Business Line New Delhi: Even as Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan claimed on Thursday that onion prices have started cooling down in both retail and wholesale markets, Shetkari Sanghatana, an apex farmers’ body in Maharashtra, announced that all onion markets would be indefinitely closed from October 7 if the Centre failed to revoke its decision to ban onion exports and imposition of stock limits on traders. Retail onion prices, which...

-The Hindu Business Line Low food inflation and high services inflation in rural India is doing more bad than good for the rural population CPI Inflation in August came in at benign 3.21 per cent, although it recorded a marginal uptick from July. A deeper look at the numbers brings out the widening disparity between the urban and rural inflation. Rural inflation in August was almost half of urban retail inflation. With...

-The Hindu Business Line The government must simplify and rationalise GST, kickstart rural consumption, revive agriculture and tackle the lack of credit for capital creation, says former PM Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, an eminent economist himself, feels that the Narendra Modi-led government needs to come out of its habit of headline management and address the economic challenges which the country is facing today. “We cannot afford to deny that India is facing...