-The Hindu The primary health-care system in India, intended to enable affordable health care, has not delivered on its promise. Rural, public health facilities are unable to attract, retain and ensure the regular presence of trained medical professionals. Health centres and hospitals in the public sector have proliferated but they are distributed inequitably. India may have one government hospital bed for every 1,833 people, but the reality is that while in...

-FirstPost.com Preparation of budgets is traditionally an incremental process: the first railway budget of the present government took off from the landscape sketched in the 12th Five Year Plan. Expansion, modernisation and development of railway infrastructure were to be given thrust through 3Ps: Public-Private Partnerships. Budget 2016-17, however, promises a new horizon on two fronts: overcoming challenges through 3Rs: Reorganising, Restructuring and Rejuvenating Indian railways, and introducing pillars of strategy, including zero-based...

Amidst uncertainty over India's performance in terms of agricultural production and livelihood security of rural population, the Union Budget of 2016-17 will be presented by Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley on 29 February. Given the extent of drought in more than 10 states of India during 2015-16, it is expected that the NDA Government will allocate more resources for rejuvenating the rural sector. Since the country has seen two years of...

-Livemint.com Spending on irrigation, crop insurance to be doubled; e-platform to be developed for farm produce New Delhi: The government is set to double annual spending on irrigation and crop insurance, and develop a national digital platform for farm produce in order to ensure better prices for farmers, as part of a push to reduce rural distress following the first back-to-back drought in India in three decades. “We’re expecting that the new...

-The Hindu Jan Breman takes a long view of the changes he’s seen in India over half a century. Perhaps no other scholar in the social sciences has studied India’s poor and its informal economy as intensively as Jan Breman. The sheer temporal span of his research is mind-boggling. He began his study in south Gujarat 15 years after India’s Independence — in 1962. And he was in south Gujarat in...