-The Hindu Business Line The main grouse that States have with PMFBY is that while premiums are distributed evenly across participants, claims are cornered by a few Six years after its launch and post multiple overhauls, Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), India’s flagship scheme for crop insurance, has largely failed to deliver on its objectives. An expert committee steered by Ashok Dalwai recently submitted a report showing that, between 2016 and...

-The Hindu Expanding PDS coverage to account for the increase in population since 2011 is a no-brainer; the Government’s resistance to implementing a Supreme Court of India direction is baffling The National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013, THRough the Public Distribution System (PDS), provides a crucial safety net for roughly 800 million people. Even critics of the PDS appreciated its services during the COVID-19 lockdown. The humanitarian crisis resulting from the COVID-19 lockdown,...

-The Hindu Prevalence of anaemia among men in rural areas was lowest in the southern States (18.5%) and highest in the eastern region (34.1%) While anaemia among adolescent girls and boys, and women, particularly those of reproductive age has been studied extensively, anaemia in men has been largely ignored. In 2019, a paper published in  The Lancet Global Health highlighted that nearly one in four men (23.2%) in the age group 15-54...

-The Telegraph Centre said it had conveyed its stand on the points raised by the two-judge bench to the secretary-general of the apex court in a letter dated July 11, 2017, but had not received any response New Delhi: The Centre has sought to blame the delays in judges’ appointments, for which the Supreme Court has repeatedly reprimanded it, on the collegium itself. The government invoked observations by a two-judge bench in 2017...

There is some respite expected for India in terms of prices of imported commodities. This may ease the depletion of its foreign exchange reserves. The country has faced a widening of its merchandise trade deficit from US$ -17.91 billion to US$ -26.91 billion between October 2021 and October 2022. The commodity price data provided by the World Bank in December 2022 (termed as The Pink Sheet) shows that energy prices plummeted by...