-Business Standard While allocations to several social sector schemes have been increased, concerns about the direction of the funds being ploughed remain The health and education sectors have trudged along the last two years awaiting direction that would be set through new policies the National Democratic Alliance government promised. In the absence of these guiding documents, most observers have been left to read the intermittent policy decisions like tea-leaves to guess the...

-The Indian Express Disaster-conscious planning as part of the urban agenda is helping India better prepare for natural calamities. Chennai 2015, Srinagar 2014, Uttarakhand 2013, Mumbai 2005. These disastrous floods remind us that without proper planning, unusually heavy rains in densely populated areas can brew a deadly cocktail for disaster. The issue is not just India’s alone. In our rapidly urbanising world, making towns and cities safer is emerging as one...

-The Hindu Business Line India should fine-tune its scheme to make it WTO-compliant The fact that the Centre’s new crop insurance scheme has hit a WTO speedbreaker does not really surprise. The EU, Canada, Australia and Thailand have implicitly said that in its present form, insurance payouts cannot readily be placed in the ‘green box’ — one that exempts certain expenditures from farm subsidy calculations for WTO purposes. They have, in effect,...

-The Hindu Business Line Mumbai: The newly-launched Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) will bring about 50 per cent of India’s farmers in the crop insurance net and help reduce the prevailing distress in the agriculture sector, according to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. PMFBY is distinct from all earlier schemes in the sense that it not only takes the number of insured farmers to a higher level (from 20 per cent earlier...

-The Hindu The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana scheme, which recognises the importance of clean cooking energy, is welcome. But we need to focus on issues of cash flow, awareness, availability and administration Within a fortnight of the recently announced Union Budget, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, earmarking Rs. 8,000 crore for it, with the aim of providing five crore subsidised Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG)...