-Down to Earth India ranked 19th among 45 developing countries assessed by UK-based organisation India has made quite some progress in countering hunger and under-nutrition in the past two years but Nepal and Bangladesh have done better and have shown serious commitment through political will, says the Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI) report, 2013. The annual HANCI report, prepared by non-profit Institute of Development Studies and International Food Policy Research Institute funded...

-Economic and Political Weekly There is no policy in India for tuberculosis control and the centrally-run Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme has neither mandate nor agenda for TB control. There are short, medium and long term remedies for the maladies of the revised programme which are detailed in this article. TB is both a biomedical and a social, cultural and economic problem. Citizens must demand a national policy for TB control. T...

-The Hindu   The national discourse is so superficial that it only talks of foreign direct investment, investment allowance, tax sops and the like which are just about a twentieth to a sixth of the national economy. It did not even notice paragraph 102 in the Union budget speech which is about half of India's economy. Commentators see facts hidden in budgets as the "devil's in the detail." This presumes that only...

-Economic and Political Weekly State intervention in India to expand financial inclusion to rural areas has had an interesting history. It has moved away from building state-led institutions to setting policy that pushed financial inclusion through non-state agencies as well. While identity, de-duplication, and authentication were issues that affected the pace of financial inclusion, they were not the most significant problems to be fixed. By allowing the Aadhaar project to set...

-The Hindu Overall, the Budget places considerable emphasis on agricultural renewal and agrarian prosperity. Obviously, the allocations are small but a beginning has been made to look at the problems in farming in a more holistic manner. The Union Budget is a resource allocation exercise. The priorities in the allocation were indicated in the address of the President to Parliament on June 9. While the President's address provides a framework for political...