-The Indian Express Indian healthcare providers need to get serious about infection control. A deadly strain of bacterium has doubled its resistance to last-resort antibiotics within a year, according to the report “State of the World’s Antibiotics, 2015”. By an estimate, antimicrobial resistance — the ability of bugs to outwit antibiotics — will claim two million lives in India by 2050, a fifth of the total. India is under pressure to curb...

-DNA When it comes to farmers, the government has precious little to offer The monsoon season is over. With 14 per cent shortfall in the amount of rains, and with nearly 39 per cent of the cropped area in the country hit by a crippling drought, I was expecting the Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan to announce a series of monetary benefits and exemptions in credit repayments for farmers....

-The Indian Express The voucher scheme is supposed to act as an intervention for LIG and EWS segments who are forced to seek accommodation elsewhere in the face of inadequate social rental housing THE MINISTRY of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation is considering introduction of subsidies, in the form of direct benefit transfer, that would be provided to economically weaker sections (EWS) and low income group (LIG) households towards their rent payments. The...

-The Hindu Business Line Our pulses trade and output policies are made with the wrong ingredients The present spike in prices of pulses is a fallout of both structural and short-term factors. Years of flawed production and trade policies, along with the absence of technological breakthroughs to improve yields, have led to stagnation in output. The retail prices of pulses have galloped along at a faster rate ever since the fourth advance...

-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 —...