-The Hindu Sluggish health spending can be reversed with a substantial increase in the allocation for health in the Union Budget India’s neighbours, in the past two decades, have made great strides on the development front. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan now have better health indicators than India, which has puzzled many. How could these countries make the great escape from the diseases of poverty earlier than their much bigger neighbour? India’s...

-DNA The Niti Aayog’s recent report on ‘Strategy for New India @ 75’ rightly recognises that the multidimensional determinants of undernutrition are inadequately reflected in policymaking. It argues that there must be convergent action with annual health, nutrition and sanitation plans being made in an integrated manner for all districts. In the case of Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), which is the main programmatic platform through which nutrition outcomes are to...

-News18.com Acclaimed journalist and Founder-Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India, P Sainath attributes the existential crisis confronting India’s agrarian society to macro-economic policies set in motion 25 years ago. Talking to Anuradha SenGupta, Sainath makes a case for state intervention in agriculture and says the Modi government, with its shifting positions and policies like demonetisation has only aggravated the assault on agrarian livelihoods. Dismissing the buzz about imminent new initiatives...

-Newsclick.in The former AMU Vice Chancellor is the brain behind Sir Syed National School, a successful modern school, totally funded by the Muslim community in Muzaffarnagar. PATNA: A retired Lieutenant General of the Indian Army and former Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, Lt Gen (Retd) Zameer Uddin Shah, emits a missionary zeal when he talks about the need for “modern and secular” education for Muslim children, instead of “ghettoised” schools. “We have...

-Economic and Political Weekly The union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare had prescribed a model Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee Act in 2003. The state-level adoption of the act has been tardy and varied in terms of both the magnitude and content of agricultural market reforms. Yet, the ministry under the current central government has come up with another model act, the Agricultural Produce and Livestock Marketing (Promotion and Facilitation) Act,...