In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...

-The Hindu Business Line Kerala’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the subject of international conversation about public health systems. Piloting Kerala’s fight against the pandemic is the State’s Health Minister and CPI(M)’s Central Committee member KK Shailaja who speaks exclusively to BusinessLine about the criticality of publicly-run healthcare and how the need of the hour is to nationalise the system. Excerpts: * What are the lessons to be learnt from...

The National Food Security Act 2013 guarantees maternity benefit to the tune of Rs. 6,000/- per child by the Central Government for pregnant women and lactating mothers, barring those who are already availing such benefits while being in regular employment with the Central Government or State Governments or Public Sector Undertakings or under other laws. The NFSA 2013 also legally guarantees free meals for every pregnant woman and lactating mother...

-The Hindu The political emphasis on welfare interventions is insufficient to address the emerging developmental issues in the State A major concern in contemporary Indian development is the widening socio-economic disparity across groups and regions. Even when regions perform relatively better in one developmental dimension, it does not often translate into all round development. For instance, Himachal Pradesh and Kerala might have attained better levels of human development but that has not...

-The Hindu Students without background will get bridge courses, says AICTE Prospective engineering students will not have to mandatorily study Maths and Physics in Class 12, according to new norms released by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) for 2021-22. Council Chairperson Anil Sahasrabudhe defended the changes on Friday, saying they are in line with the multi-disciplinary approach of the new National Education Policy. Till now, only those who opted for Physics...