Governments in India — Centre and states — spend around one per cent of the country's GDP on health. Only five countries — Burundi, Myanmar, Pakistan , Sudan and Cambodia — have a lower figure than this. But private spending on the crucial sector is 4.2 per cent of GDP, among the top 20 countries in the world. Within this private spend, employers pay for about 9 per cent and...

Wrong policies of the government have been responsible for the prevalent food insecurity in the country, alleged activists. They also said the proposed National Food Security Act ignores the root causes of hunger and it deliberately leaves untouched the structural roots of the malnutrition crisis. Releasing a report on India’s food security scenario and the reasons behind it on Tuesday activist Vandana Shiva said following Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings on self-reliance together...

While India’s new Right to Education Act seeks to bring free and compulsory education for all children, it seems to short-change them through an unrealistic vision of the private sector’s involvement. In August 2009, the Right to Education Act was passed in the Indian Parliament with no debate, by the fewer than 60 members who happened to be attending the session that day. Not that the Act was an open-and-shut...

The Central budget of 2010-11 is a further step in the realisation of a vision of India vibrant with the income, wealth, saving, education and the entrepreneurial energy of the top 5-10 per cent of the population and the rest of Indians, serving that minority and surviving as barely literate, malnourished multitude.  With the accession of Rajiv Gandhi to power, a vision began to germinate. That vision was that of...

Nearly 2 lakh farmers committed suicide in India since 1997. The share of big five states accounted for 1,22,823 suicides in this 12 year period. The data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau points out that 16,196 farmers in India ended their life in 2008. K Nagaraj, an economist, in his report Farmers' suicides in India: Magnitude, Trends and Spatial Patterns, says, "The title to land was taken as the...