-Live Mint The fundamental pathology of Indian policy is the overwhelming preference for subsidies over public goods One useful way to understand a fundamental flaw in policymaking in India since 2004 is to ask a rhetorical question: why is the ruling United Progressive Alliance aggressively pushing for a law guaranteeing the right to food rather than one for the right to clean drinking water? Take a look at the numbers. A February...
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Arsenic poisoning water in North Karnataka: CAG -Sunitha Rao R
-The Times of India BANGALORE: Safe drinking water for all is a common promise in the manifestos of all political parties. Yet, villagers in North Karnataka are drinking water with high arsenic content, said a Comptroller and Auditor General report released on Thursday. Though the National Rural Drinking Water Mission looked into the issue, it made a conscious effort to keep itself away from the high-cost treatment technologies to deal with arsenic...
More »What we need is not a food security Bill but a hunger elimination Act -Arvind Virmani
-The Times of India In the decade or so that i was at the Planning Commission, i always had advisory responsibility for the food ministry/public distribution system, among other issues of development policy. It did not take very long to find out that the fundamental problem with the system was about so-called "leakages" abetted by corruption: One soon learnt that the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was one of the most...
More »Maharashtra infant gets polio from vaccine, third such case in the country -Himanshu Nitnaware & Umesh Isalkar
-The Times of India AURANGABAD/ PUNE: An 11-month-old boy from Maharashtra's Beed district has been found infected with the vaccine derived polio virus (VDPV). This is the first such case in the state and the third in the country since March 2012. Health officials said the boy's stool sample tested positive for VDPV on June 1. "The child has been ill for prolonged periods, indicating the possibility of immunodeficiency," an official said. The...
More »Training 500 mn people by 2022 unrealistic: Govt think-tank IAMR -Vikas Dhoot
-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The Manmohan Singh government's target of skilling 500 million people by 2022 is grossly inflated and is based on a speech by late management guru CK Prahalad instead of any demographic analysis. The country would actually need only about half that number of trained manpower by then, the government's own think-tank, the Institute of Applied Manpower Research (IAMR), has said in a research paper. The IAMR, housed under...
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