-Frontline The problem in rural India is not one of too much credit to poor households that leads to debt waivers that damage bank balance sheets, but one of inadequate access to credit from formal sources. IF Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan is to be believed, efforts to help Indian farmers by providing them with cheap(er) credit and relieving them of an unsustainable debt burden only harms them in the...

-Economic and Political Weekly The key to improving the quality of healthcare services in India and reducing costs at the same time can be found by enacting legislation which lays down minimum standards of patient care. In the absence of such standards and the reluctance of health insurance companies to standardise either price or quality, healthcare services continue to be expensive and of doubtful quality. Developing standards of patient care by...

-The Times of India There is good news and bad news on one of the key problems that haunts India - survival of the girl child. Sex ratio at birth, that is, the number of girls born for every 1000 boys born, has inched up from 906 to 909 between 2007 and 2013. This suggests that female feticide, the monstrous practice of killing off the girl baby in the mothers' womb...

-Frontline The Left and other national parties protest against the NDA government's attempts to dilute the MGNREGS by limiting its budget and reducing its reach. IN a rare show of solidarity, representatives of several political parties took issue with the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government on its controversial proposal to restructure the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). The opposition, which was initially confined to the...

-The Indian Express New Delhi: "This government is trying to snatch away our rights, of both employment and land. We have come all the way to fight such injustice. Several people in my village voted for this government hoping they would improve our lives but they are doing just the opposite," said Lal Singh from Rajsamand district in Rajasthan. At a time when the NDA government's proposals to bring changes to some...