-Down to Earth Income inequality makes agrarian crisis challenging; inequality is worse among farmers than the formal economy Economists Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty recently concluded after a long study that inequality is at its peak in India. It is embedded in popular conscience: “Top 1 per cent of earners captured 22 per cent of total income in the country.” Their study–covering consumption, government accounts and income tax data from 1922...
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Vaccination rates among India's rich have dropped, the national family health survey shows -Nayantara Narayanan
-Scroll.in Meanwhile, 55% of all Indians do not go to public hospitals to seek treatment. In 2017, India saw much uproar over the state of health facilities and medical services in the country. Rumours about vaccine safety dogged immunisation campaigns in some states, child deaths in government hospitals have raised questions about the state of public health facilities across the country, and large corporate hospitals have come under the scanner for...
More »Reetika Khera, Associate Professor of Economics at IIT-Delhi, interviewed by Surabhi (The Hindu Business Line)
-The Hindu Business Line The government must universalise social security pensions for the elderly, single women and persons with disabilities and also operationalise the maternity entitlement scheme at the earliest, says Reetika Khera, Associate Professor of Economics at IIT-Delhi. In an interview to BusinessLine, Khera argued against the use of Aadhaar for authentication of beneficiaries and said it has “no role in plugging leakages or in the identification of correct beneficiaries”....
More »Niti Aayog and Union HRD ministry compete over state education roadmaps -Shreya Roy Chowdhury
-Scroll.in Both want states to take their advice in restructuring their primary schools. Government think-tank Niti Aayog’s collaboration with three state education departments appears to have set off friction with the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development. An official of the Niti Aayog, who did not want to be identified, said the ministry has objected to the think-tank’s programme called Sustainable Action for Transforming Human Capital, or SATH. Under the programme,...
More »Maternity entitlements on hold: How the government has undermined women's and children's rights -Jean Dreze
-The Times of India One year ago, on 31 December 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that the government would soon provide for maternity benefits of Rs 6,000 per child. He announced this as if it were a new initiative, possibly aimed at sweetening the demonetisation pill. What he did not mention is that maternity entitlements of Rs 6,000 per child had been a legal right of all Indian women since...
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