-The Hindustan Times The government has chosen the Ordinance route to put into force several legislative Bills over the past months. Many of these are expected to be tabled in Parliament in the upcoming budget session. HT explains four of them. What is an ordinance? As per Article 123 of the Constitution, when Parliament is not in session, the President has the power to promulgate an Ordinance - which has the same force...

-Business Standard Currently, the Department of Agriculture runs two crop insurance schemes, one of which is weather-based The Centre is devising an insurance product for farmers that will guarantee to make good their loss in income from natural calamities for at least seven years. For crops with minimum support prices (MSPs), the loss in income will be based on the MSP; for others, it will be calculated based on the average market...

-Economic and Political Weekly The key to improving the quality of healthcare services in India and reducing costs at the same time can be found by enacting legislation which lays down minimum standards of patient care. In the absence of such standards and the reluctance of health insurance companies to standardise either price or quality, healthcare services continue to be expensive and of doubtful quality. Developing standards of patient care by...

-The Business Standard Ministers in the Narendra Modi government have been busy making presentations on their 100 days of work. But what these presentations do not mention is that decisions by ministers have been few, with plenty of papers and files moving to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), which is increasingly emerging as a centralised clearance point, even for routine and ordinary issues. Though policy paralysis was a term used freely...

-The Business Standard   Badly structured insurance leaves Indian farmers exposed Ever since its inception in the early 1970s, agricultural insurance has defied all attempts to make it farmer-friendly and economically viable. Over half a dozen different models for farm risk management have been tried out, but with little success. The systems currently used - the National Agricultural Insurance Scheme (NAIS) and the Modified NAIS (MNAIS) - were objected to by the Insurance...