-The Telegraph New Delhi: Most households covered by government-funded health insurance have to use personal funds to pay for hospitalisation, a study has suggested, iterating concerns about the wisdom of deploying public-funded insurance schemes to seek universal health coverage in India. The study, designed to determine how well government-funded health insurance protects households from health expendiTure, has found that 66 per cent of such households who sought healthcare in public hospitals and...

-The Indian Express As Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath hits the road for civic polls, The Indian Express travels across the state to track the change he’s brought. Lucknow: Barely 500 m from the half-samadhi half-mazaar that is the monument to poet Kabir, Mohammad Asad tells a story about the growing number of abandoned cattle in the Maghar kasba of Sant Kabir Nagar in eastern Uttar Pradesh. “A truck comes here at...

-The Indian Express Union government must address strucTural issues in agriculTural policy, allow states greater autonomy. Farmers from across the country are out on Delhi’s streets agitating just as the deliberations for the 2018 budget are beginning and it’s time to seek solutions to the strucTural issues that plague the system. The “one-size-fits-all” policy created for the farm sector is self-destructive in design and programmes meant to double farmer incomes are collapsing. The...

-National Academy of AgriculTural Sciences (NAAS)   This policy brief, developed by the National Academy of AgriculTural Sciences, to address the roblem of air pollution due to crop residue burning, provides an innovative viable solution to check burning of rice residues, which is a major contributor to air pollution in the early winter months in North-West plains of India. The Academy hopes that the Central and State Governments of the affected States...

-TheWire.in The farmers have done their job. The nation has failed to deliver them a decent income in reTurn. Farmers are coming onto the streets across the country – in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and now from all states into Delhi. As the agitations intensify and take a national character, it is necessary for the nation to understand what is driving them. Are they asking for the sky,...