-The Hindu The reduction of out-of-pocket expenditure that the NHA highlights is essentially due to a decline in utilisation of care Low public spending on health in India has meant that people depend heavily on their own means to access health care. It causes rich-poor, rural-urban, gender and caste-based divides in access to health care, pushes people to poverty, and forces them to incur debt or sell assets. As a result, our...

-The Hindu Nutrition indicators recorded in real-time are not in the public domain The Ministry of Women and Child Development has spent over ₹1,000 crore on its Poshan or Nutrition Tracker, which records real-time data on malnourished and ‘severe acute malnourished’ children in each anganwadi. But four years since its launch, the Government is yet to make the data public. The Government has spent ₹1,053 crore on the Poshan Tracker or Information Communication...

-Economic and Political Weekly The appropriateness of the criterion that pegs the ratio of Public Health expenditure to the gross domestic product—which is volatile—needs a re-examination. The targets for allocation and expenditure of financial resources for health need to be based on indicators that can be monitored. Please click here to access the article.    ...

-The Hindu Total Fertility Rate has dropped to 2.0, indicating just replacement level. Births in institutional facilities, such as a hospital, improved by nearly eight percentage points but children who were either stunted or displayed signs of wasting only dropped by a maximum of three percentage points, shows a comparison of the National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5) and NFHS-4. The complete results of the NFHS-5 were made public on Wednesday. The NFHS-4 was...

-Down to Earth Pond-based greywater treatment systems in Kurak Jagir village in Karnal district, Haryana, absorb greywater  More than 70 per cent of freshwater across rural households in India gets converted to greywater. With the Union water ministry’s Jal Jeevan Mission providing tap water connection to every rural household at the rate of 55 litres per capita per day, the problem is set to intensify. Greywater refers to wastewater from non-toilet systems, that...