-The Hindu Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the first indigenously developed and manufactured rotavirus vaccine on Monday here. Every year, diarrhoea caused by rotavirus results in up to 10 lakh hospitalisations and kills nearly 80,000 children under the age of 5. The three-dose ROTAVAC vaccine, developed through a collaboration between India and the United States, is expected to help bring about a significant reduction in the 100,000 infant deaths caused by...

-Frontline Kerala is facing a situation where health care costs are leading more and more people, not just low-income families, to financial distress. KERALA is once again drawing attention to itself, this time for a persistent trend of a large number of households being pushed into financial ruin because of the expenses incurred for medical care. Several studies have now found evidence for the many facets of this worrying development in a...

-The Indian Express The Union budget is largely about the intentions and policies of the government of the day, as well as the arithmetic of resource mobilisation and allocation to achieve certain ends in the economy. The diagnostics of various economic problems and their probable solutions are generally found in the Economic Survey. The Economic Survey clearly indicates that growth in agri-GDP in FY15 has collapsed to just 1.1 per cent, while...

-Hindustan Times Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's claims of already having achieved an economic turnaround, made in his budget speech, evoke suspicion. Inflation is certainly down and so is the current account deficit, but that has almost entirely to do with the crash in international crude oil prices, which have fallen from $110 per barrel in June 2014 to around $57 per barrel currently. In fact, rather than passing on the full...

-The Indian Express The forthcoming budget is expected by some to be make-or-break or path-breaking, by others, to provide a legislative or economic roadmap for the rest of this government's term. Most likely, it will focus on issues within the purview of the finance ministry, namely, macro management, taxation, expenditure, the financial sector and balance of payments. The abolition of the Planning Commission and the 14th Finance Commission recommendations on tax devolution...