-The Hindu New Delhi: Anganwadi services have a poor reach among key beneficiaries – the poorest of the poor and uneducated mothers – according to a paper published in a WHO bulletin recently. The government’s Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) provides a package of six services at anganwadi or child-care centres to young children and pregnant women and lactating mothers. These services include supplementary nutrition, referral services, immunisation, health check-up, pre-school non-formal...

-The Hindu A basic income scheme will deliver benefits to the poor only if it comes on top of public services The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) is gaining ground globally. It has supporters among the political left and right, and among proponents as well as opponents of the free-market economy. A UBI requires the government to pay every citizen a fixed amount of money on a regular basis and...

-Networkideas.org The basic income scheme that is in the air these days, which amounts to handing over a certain sum of money to every household to ensure that it reaches a threshold cash income, is an extremely flawed scheme. Instead of enjoining upon the state the obligation to provide essential goods and services like food, education, and health, to its citizens, it absolves the State of all such responsibility, once it...

-The Telegraph For starters, it would alter the prices at which such support was calculated for ensuring a basic real income With Rahul Gandhi’s announcement of the Congress’s “historic decision” to adopt an income guarantee scheme, the idea of a universal basic income, mooted in the Economic Survey two years ago, has suddenly got a fillip. It appears attractive at first sight: its universality avoids the discrimination, exclusion and jockeying that typically...

-The Indian Express Social policy is in danger of getting lost in electoral histrionics. As the country inches towards parliamentary elections, a deep confusion pervades the realm of social policy. When the Narendra Modi government came to power five years ago, there were high expectations of a rollback in welfare schemes. The previous government, so went the story, had gone overboard with social spending, and Modi would set this right. In...