-The Indian Express A single national agriculture market, promised by the BJP in its 2014 manifesto, remains a pipe dream. Can the government reform the broken APMC structure in the last year of its term? In its 2014 Lok Sabha election manifesto, the BJP promised to evolve a single national agriculture market (NAM) in the country with a view to enable farmers to get a better price and consumers to pay a...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Three fathers who lost a child each to alleged medical negligence and a patients' rights group have asked the Union health ministry to establish new mechanisms to address complaints of negligence. The existing institutional mechanisms to protect patients has failed and broken down, their letter to minister J.P. Nadda and health officials on Saturday said. The parents and the rights group, the All India Drug Action Network, have sought...

-Civil Society News New Delhi: In 1974, Dr Samir Chaudhuri, a paediatrician working in Kolkata’s slums, founded Child in Need Institute (CINI) to tackle the many dimensions of child malnutrition. It struck him at the time that malnutrition wasn’t just a clinical problem but a complex phenomenon rooted in gender issues. Over the years, led by Dr Chaudhuri, CINI developed deep understanding of the social, economic and political underpinnings of malnutrition...

-TheWire.in The Modi government is pushing insurance schemes in both health and agriculture. But are they really making a difference? How successful, effective and equitable is insurance as a state policy? Does it address what it is meant to address in the first place, be it in health or agriculture? How does it handle systemic risk, which is essentially uninsurable? Does it also present a lost opportunity for improving the delivery of...

-Frontline.in The women-led climate-resilient farming model created by Swayam Shikshan Prayog in drought-hit Marathwada has yielded encouraging results and is worthy of emulation across the country. “LOOK at our quinoa. It has grown so well,” says a beaming Shailaja Narwade from Masia village near Solapur in interior Maharashtra. Shailaja has planted the traditional South American plant not for consumption but in order to harvest its seeds. “Quinoa seeds are very valuable...