-The Hindu It is critical that the HPS is finalised after considering possible distortions in medical insurance schemes and looking at models that have worked. The Health Protection Scheme (HPS) that was announced in the Union Budget 2016 is more generous than the earlier scheme, the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY). Poor households now get an annual health cover of Rs.1 lakh; the limit under RSBY was Rs.30,000. In principle, the HPS...
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Revisit interest subsidy scheme for farmers -Ashutosh Kumar Tripathi
-The Hindu Business Line It should apply to long-term rather than short-term loans, to prevent funds misuse and promote capital formation The Budget 2016-17 witnessed an increase of Rs. 2,000 crore in the allocation towards interest subsidy for short-term credit (i.e. crop loan) to farmers, compared with the revised estimate for 2015-16, thereby making a total provision of Rs. 15,000 crore towards interest subsidy. In fact, of the total allocation of Rs. 35,984...
More »India’s jobless growth is undermining its ability to reap the demographic dividend -Christophe Jaffrelot
-The Indian Express The last quarterly survey by the Labour Bureau showed that India has never created so few jobs, since the survey started in 2009 The last quarterly survey by the Labour Bureau showed that India has never created so few jobs, since the survey started in 2009, as in 2015: Only 1.35 lakh jobs compared to more than nine lakh in 2011 and 4.19 lakh in 2013 in eight labour-intensive...
More »Unseeing the drought -Harsh Mander
-The Indian Express The suffering of millions does not create public outrage, much less government accountability. The people of India’s villages carry collective memories of centuries of calamitous losses of sometimes millions of lives in famines. Famines have been pushed into history, unarguably one of free India’s greatest accomplishments. But the same can’t be said about droughts, which continue to extract an enormous toll on human suffering. At least a third of the...
More »The season of scorching ironies -Yogendra Yadav
-The Hindu It is the Supreme Court and not Parliament that has found time to pay attention to serious issues of drought relief and mitigation for hundreds of millions of Indians Irony. This one word captures our response to the ongoing nationwide drought in more ways than one. We have woken up to the reality of drought a full six months after the end of monsoon. After waking up, we focus on...
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