-Livemint.com India needs to defend policies that make agriculture remunerative and stand by its poor at this stage of development In an attempt to combat rural distress, the Union budget announced this year by finance minister Arun Jaitley promised a new deal to farmers—minimum support prices (MSP) that would be 150% of the cost of production. The government is expected to announce the first set of support prices under the new policy in...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A study has ranked India 145 among 195 countries and lower than China, Bangladesh and Sudan on health care access and quality, measured through their capacities to prevent premature deaths from 32 diseases. The study by an international consortium of researchers has revealed India's gains over time but widening gap between best and worst scores within the country, a finding that public health experts say possibly reflects inequities...

-The Indian Express Women form 80 per cent of urban migrants, but public policy is blind to their concerns. A recent UN report says India is on the “brink of an urban revolution”, as its Population in towns and cities are expected to reach 600 million by 2031. Fuelled by migration, megacities of India (Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata) will be among the largest urban concentrations in the world. Interestingly, the 2011 Census...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A panel of doctors has called for changes to the rules banning prenatal sex determination, warning they are depriving rural Populations of easy access to the point-of-care ultrasound scans (pocus) needed to diagnose and treat critically ill patients. Doctors associated with the Jan Swasthya Sahyog, which runs a rural hospital in Chhattisgarh, have recommended technology and better policing to improve access to the scans and curb their misuse...

-Scroll.in The committee goes on to list the ‘basic elements’ that make an individual indigenous to Assam. The transfer of agricultural land should be restricted to people indigenous to the state, a committee appointed by the Assam government in February 2017 for “ensuring the protection of land rights of indigenous people” has recommended in a report submitted in January. The Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state has said that it...