-The Indian Express Budget’s bias toward privately-delivered care undermines universal health coverage Until about four decades ago, specialist healthcare (secondary and tertiary care) was largely a province of public hospitals, and the private sector largely kept itself to the provision of generalist healthcare. This underwent a transformation with the rise of the advanced medical interventions comprising tertiary-care medicine like organ transplantation and open heart surgery. Given these highly-profitable medical advances, the private...

-Scroll.in To spend 2.5% of GDP on healthcare by 2025, the centre and state governments must increase healthcare allocation by 24% over the same period of time. Healthcare needs continue to cause financial hardship to people across India. The National Health Accounts 2014-’15 report reveals that more than two-thirds of total spending on health (67%) is household out-of-pocket expenditure. The report tracks how much money is spent on health and how money...

-TheWire.in This is the last full budget of the present government and the last opportunity for it to demonstrate its commitment to India’s health and nutrition. Slow improvements in basic indicators of maternal and child mortality, double burden of communicable as well as non-communicable diseases, high out-of-pocket expenditure, a failing public sector and heavily commercialised private sector characterise the healthcare crisis in India. The year 2017 saw a number of incidents in the...

-ThePrint.in The first assessment of 14-18 year olds shows girls abandoning school much more than boys; Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian says he’s worried. New Delhi: For the last 11 years, the Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) on school education showed that there was parity between the number of 6-10-year-old girls and boys who were enrolled in or had dropped out of school. This indicated that girls and boys did equally...

-The Financial Express The Odisha experience shows that PDS can play a pivotal role in bringing convergence and making India’s two important missions—food and nutrition security—successful in a short time. New Delhi: India’s public distribution system (PDS) is the largest food security programme in the world, which covers nearly 60% of the population and costs Rs 1.45 trillion—close to 1.4% of the national income. PDS has often been criticised for its structure,...