-The Hindu It has long been argued that government spending on health should increase to 2.5 per cent of GDP. National Health Accounts (NHA) monitors the flow of resources in a country’s health system and provides detailed data on health finances. The NHA estimates for India for the Financial year 2013-14 were published earlier this week, after a long void of almost a decade. The previous estimates were for the year 2004-05. In...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The proposed surrogacy law that prevents women from renting out their wombs for Financial gain will be a blow to infertile couples unable to find the service for free, sections of doctors in infertility treatment services said today. The specialists said a law that insists that a surrogate woman has to be a close relative of the infertile couple would be "impractical" and may also raise the risk...

-The Hindu The Centre had carried out an exercise to eliminate duplicate, fake, ghost, and inactive accounts New Delhi: The Petroleum Ministry has issued a rebuttal claiming its calculations were correct on the savings on account of direct benefit transfer in LPG cylinders tabled in Parliament. A report by the Comptroller and Auditor General had questioned the method arrived at on the savings, more than 10 days ago. The report, tabled on August 12,...

The state of Jharkhand has been in the news recently but for the wrong reasons. The NREGS workers who worked for constructing dobhas (small farm ponds) across the state during April to June 2016 have been treated unfairly by the officials in the sense that they were not paid their due wages, alleges a group of local activists. Despite complaints being made by the aggrieved workers, no action has been...

-Frontline Medecins Sans Frontieres warns that the free or regional trade agreements that are being negotiated, which seek to strengthen current patent regimes, are a potential threat to the developing world’s access to life-saving drugs, which it sources mostly from India. WHEN NELSON MANDELA’S GOVERNMENT passed the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act in 1997 to make medicines more accessible to the poor, 39 big pharmaceutical companies filed law suits in...