“Huge subsidy on chemical fertilisers unmindful, useless” Small and marginal farmers have raised the demand for special allocation for organic farming and ecological fertilisation in the forthcoming budget, which finance minister Pranab Mukherjee will present on March 16. According to them, chemical fertilisers, the subsidy for which is likely to touch Rs 1 lakh crore in 2011-12,  are not benefitting the soil and are burdening them with high-cost cultivation instead. “The government...

-Live Mint High on hype, the budget speech of the Union finance minister today is merely a statement of account. As India’s economy diversifies—with the private sector playing an increasingly important role—this annual feature has assumed much lower salience. Not only have fiscal policies lost the space they enjoyed in earlier years, even major policy announcements are restricted to being mere statements of account. Examples from other arenas include “activism” on...

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is likely to run into a debate on public health policy after the Planning Commission moved to nix a proposal to include healthcare in the list of public entitlements such as education and food. Central to the proposal—initiated by a high-level expert group (HLEG) headed by K. Srinath Reddy, a leading advocate of preventive cardiology and president of the Public Health Foundation of India—was the...

While welcoming the report of the High Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage for India for its comprehensive vision and many well-conceived recommendations, this article focuses on the conditions needed for its promise to bear fruit. Towards this, it explores the political dimension, which comprises the forces and interests that come into play to shape and reconfigure administrative policy and its implementation.   We are grateful to Anand Zachariah and Susie...

Dr Abhijit Sen is Member, Planning Commission of India. He is a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge (currently on leave as Professor of Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University) and has also taught at the Universities of Sussex, Oxford and Cambridge. Besides serving various think tanks in the states and at the centre, Dr Sen has been a consultant with UNDP, ILO, FAO and various other multilateral...