-The Hindu Business Line The bureaucracy has been unable to take it forward, thanks to its reluctance to share information and ideas Having been a chief minister for long, Narendra Modi as Prime Minister has rightly put his weight behind cooperative and competitive federalism. In March last year, I had elaborated in this column the relationship between the two in the context of development and growth in India in an article ‘What sort...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: One in five patients in India treated for heart attacks had to pay over a third of their annual household income from their pockets despite health insurance, according to a study that doctors say highlights poor health care protection. The study probing the financial impacts of serious acute coronary events in a sample of 1,635 patients from 41 hospitals across the country has also found that 60 per...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre has dropped two Supreme Court-appointed food experts from its reconstituted midday-meal monitoring panel and included a member from an RSS-linked organisation with no expertise on such issues. N.C. Saxena and Biraj Patnaik, the two food SECurity commissioners on the first panel set up by former HRD minister M. Pallam Raju, have been dropped by an empowered committee headed by minister Smriti Irani. The top court had...

-The Hindu Business Line New Delhi: Several organisations and individuals have sought higher Budget outlays for all departments dealing with the agriculture SECtor if the Centre is really serious about farmers’ welfare.   “Budget 2015-16 was a serious disappointment in that it actually cut down allocations for Ministry of Agriculture to levels less than 2011-12, i.e., five years earlier! (see table) …. It is clear that farmers’ welfare added to the Ministry’s...

-The Hindu Mumbai: Ex-Chief Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi says a transparent procedure should be followed in the selection process. Alarmed at speculation that Delhi Police Commissioner B.S. Bassi could be appointed Information Commissioner in the Central Information Commission, RTI activist and former CIC Shailesh Gandhi on Thursday shot off a letter to the Centre objecting to the appointment. In a letter to Cabinet SECretary PK Sinha, Mr. Gandhi said: “There are news reports...