-The Hindu Among SAARC nations, it’s third behind Sri Lanka, Maldives India slipped down one place from 130 to 131 among the 188 countries ranked in terms of human development, says the 2016 Human Development Report (HDR) released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Tuesday. India’s human development index (HDI) value of 0.624 puts it in the “medium human development” category, alongside countries such as Congo, Namibia and Pakistan. It is...

-Livemint.com India’s Human Development Index score falls 27 % due to regional disparities in education, health parameters and living standards within the country New Delhi: India’s human development index (HDI) ranking for 2015 puts Asia’s third largest economy among a group of countries classed as “medium” in the list as opposed to “low” in the 1990s, thanks to factors like an increase in life expectancy and mean years of schooling in the...

-TheWire.in MNREGA acts as a safety net not only against extreme poverty but also against the exploitation of workers. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MMNREGA) and its impact on the various aspects of the economy continues to be an active area of research. A piece by Sumit Agarwal, Shashwat Alok, Yakshup Chopra and Prasanna L. Tantri titled “Is MGMNREGA destroying factory jobs? Disquieting data shows it discourages skill development”...

-The Hindu Strategic shifts are needed in the level of government control on the financing and provision of health India spends close to 5% of its GDP on health. While this may appear low when compared to 18% of the U.S., data show that Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries spend 8-11%, middle-income countries close to 6%, and India’s peers, the lower-middle-income countries 4.5%. By these measures, India’s health-care spending,...

-PTI New Delhi: The government has made having an Aadhaar card must for poor women to avail of free cooking gas (LPG) connection under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana. While the government in October last year had made the unique identification number mandatory for everyone to get LPG subsidies, it has now extended the same for free cooking gas connections to women of BPL households. The government had last year launched the Pradhan...