-DNA Wondering about the plight of the rural population facing successive droughts which has to buy pulses, South Asia Network for Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) laments how no benefit of the price hike is reaching actual pulse farmers. While most link the current tur (pigeon pea) dal crisis with raging market prices, storage issues, hoarding and economics, a new study highlighting the making of the crisis - by South Asia Network...

-The Hindu An evaluation of the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) has concluded that the government-financed health insurance scheme had little or no impact on medical impoverishment in India. In fact, the study found that despite high enrolment in RSBY, catastrophic health expenditures (when medical expenses push a family into poverty), hospitalisation expenditure and the percentage of total household outgo on out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses — medicines and other consumables that are not...

-Hindustan Times Amisha Paswan, an otherwise quiet and shy girl, is pretty articulate when she spells out her career plans. “I want to become a doctor and cure poor people,” she says in fluent English. Amisha loves to read fairy tales but her own life is the tale of a girl trying to succeed despite the many disadvantages that comes with being born into extreme poverty. As we speak to her on...

-The Economic Times Is publicly funded health insurance pushing poor households to actually spend more on hospitalisation? A study conducted by three public health experts of the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) suggests that this could be happening. The study found that a larger proportion of the poorest households are having to make "catastrophic spending" (defined as more than 10% of household expenditure) on hospitalisation and that the amount spent by...

-The Hindu Far from creating dependency, evidence shows that social protection increases both on-farm and non-farm activities, strengthening livelihoods and lifting incomes Today, on World Food Day, the world has a lot to celebrate. As a global community, we’ve made real progress in fighting global hunger and poverty in recent decades. A majority of the countries monitored by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation — 72 out of the 129 —...