-The Hindu The discourse must move beyond a top-down approach to listen to the people and formulate best insurance practices Much ink has been spilled in documenting the inadequacy of budgetary allocations for public health insurance, specifically for the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), the world’s largest publicly-funded health insurance (PFHI) scheme. Though the 2017-18 budget allocation has marginally increased from last year’s revised estimates, it has declined relative to last year’s...

-The Times of India MADURAI: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), rolled out a decade ago, has impacted households and individuals in a positive as well as negative way, but the adverse impacts of the scheme could impact the nation's food security, according to an authoritative study. What may set the alarm bells ringing is the projected decline in acreage under rice cultivation in states like Tamil Nadu and...

-HuffingtonPost.in "Yet more than half-way through his (Modi’s) tenure, there are almost no jobs available." The India Exclusion Report 2016, released by the New Delhi-based Centre for Equity Studies (CES) on Friday, says that fewer jobs were created under the Modi government in 2015 compared to the previous government led by the Congress Party. Citing Labour Ministry Data, the report says that employment creation in 2015 plummeted to 135,000 jobs compared to 930,000...

-The Hindu ‘Historically disadvantaged groups most excluded from access to public goods’ Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims continue to be the worst-hit communities in terms of exclusion from access to public goods, according to the 2016 Indian Exclusion Report (IXR) released by the Centre for Equity Studies (CES) in New Delhi on Wednesday. “The 2016 Report reviews exclusion with respect to four public goods: pensions for the elderly, digital access, agricultural land, and legal...

-IANS As per the report, the disruption caused by demonetisation had ‘greater and longer-lasting’ impacts for lower-income individuals, households and businesses. The Indian government’s demonetisation measures did not impede future black money flows in new denominations, a UN report said on Monday. According to UN Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific 2017, complementary measures to demonetisation would be required to target all forms of undeclared wealth and assets. “Broader structural reforms...