Lax policemen made Jharkhand’s borders porous and helped child trafficking, a shocked National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) found on its second day of public hearing here today. In the cases that came to the commission for hearing, it was revealed that the police sat idle and deaf to frantic pleas of people whose minor children went missing. The members of the commission rebuked the state police for being...

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has criticised UN agencies like the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) for not doing enough to fight hunger and poverty. “Countries, food agencies and donors aren’t working together in a focused and co-ordinated way to provide the help small farmers need, when they need it,” Gates told the governing council of the IFAD in...

While welcoming the report of the High Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage for India for its comprehensive vision and many well-conceived recommendations, this article focuses on the conditions needed for its promise to bear fruit. Towards this, it explores the political dimension, which comprises the forces and interests that come into play to shape and reconfigure administrative policy and its implementation.   We are grateful to Anand Zachariah and Susie...

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is likely to run into a debate on public Health policy after the Planning Commission moved to nix a proposal to include Healthcare in the list of public entitlements such as education and food. Central to the proposal—initiated by a high-level expert group (HLEG) headed by K. Srinath Reddy, a leading advocate of preventive cardiology and president of the Public Health Foundation of India—was the...

-Live Mint The Planning Commission’s decision to not include Healthcare in the list of essential entitlements such as education and food comes after an expert group recommended exactly the opposite. The group was to evaluate the role of the state as a Healthcare provider, and it came to the unexceptionable conclusion that public Health infrastructure should be strengthened to provide better and more affordable Healthcare to all Indians. However, the Planning...