MONA SANGWAN, a teacher at a private school in Delhi, who earns just Rs. 4,000 a month and is her family’s sole earning member, had nearly begun to despair. How on earth was she going to raise Rs. 7,000 every month to buy the medicines her brother Ashwini, a kidney transplant patient, needed? Mona would have continued to despair had not the NGO Sarvohit Social Welfare Society stepped in. And to...
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Indian households spend 7% of total expenditure on healthcare, says survey
The out-of-pocket healthcare spending by Indians continues to push them further into poverty with the public spending on health is almost negligible, according to the India Health Report 2010. Studies have documented that households in India spend a disproportionate share of their consumption expenditure on health, with the contribution from government being almost negligible. Public spending on health is very low, stagnant at about 1 per cent of GDP, putting India...
More »Biometric ration cards in two months
BANGALORE: Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs Minister R. Ashok has said biometric ration cards for both below poverty line (BPL) and above poverty line (APL) categories will be issued in the State in another two months. The Minister told presspersons here on Wednesday that the Union Government had informed the State Government that it would reimburse the expenditure incurred for issuing the biometric cards to families. Issuance of biometric cards...
More »Govt likely to miss target of 250,000 rural kiosks by ’12 by Surabhi Agarwal
An initiative to set up information technology (IT) kiosks to offer government services in rural India is likely to miss its expanded target of establishing 250,000 centres because of delays in releasing funds. The scheme to set up 100,000 common service centres (CSCs), through which villagers would be able to access a host of services, was launched in 2006. In June 2009, President Pratibha Patil said in her inaugural address to the...
More »RTI Chief on Democracy and Bureaucracy by Krishna Pokharel
Wajahat Habibullah, India’s chief information commissioner, has a towering task. He sees to it that the government gives its citizens information they ask for under the 2005 Right to Information Act, a position that effectively makes him an umpire astride India’s mighty bureaucracy and messy democracy. He is retiring later this month after five years in office—that’s how long the RTI law, which allows citizens to demand official documents, has been...
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