-Hindustan Times After a decade of the implementation of the national Right To Information (RTI) Act, it is necessary to reflect on some of its key achievements and the threats it faces. It has spread across the country, and there is no district that has not received RTI applications. It has empowered the ordinary citizen to get respect as an individual from the government and its officials. Citizens are becoming the monitors...

-The Indian Express Why early life investment matters, and what we should do about it. With the success in reducing child mortality, the challenge before India is to safeguard early-life conditions in order to prevent long-run loss in welfare for individuals and the economy. Malnutrition rates for India are extremely high, with about 38.4 per cent of children being stunted and 46 per cent underweight (National Family Health Survey, 2005-06). There...

The low rate of inflation of 3.88 percent in Consumer Food Price Index during September, 2015 actually hides the high prices at which various pulses (dal) are available in kirana / retail shops across India. In terms of Consumer Price Index (combined), monthly rate of inflation in pulses and products during September 2015 (over September last year) stood at 29.76 percent as compared to the overall monthly retail inflation of...

-The Indian Express Scapegoating ‘hoarders’ and ‘speculators’ for the spike in dal prices might have been effective in the 1960s. But today, it is only Evidence of a rather sloppy conceptual policy framework. The pulse rate of a normal and healthy human body hovers between 60 and 100 beats per minute. There can be problems if it goes any higher — and a serious threat to life over 200 beats per...

-The Hindu An evaluation of the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) has concluded that the government-financed health insurance scheme had little or no impact on medical impoverishment in India. In fact, the study found that despite high enrolment in RSBY, catastrophic health expenditures (when medical expenses push a family into poverty), hospitalisation expenditure and the percentage of total household outgo on out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses — medicines and other consumables that are not...