-TheWire.in The Ayushman Bharat scheme provides support to the most deprived portion of India’s population and engages private insurance players, positive steps that must be welcomed. In his speech on the 72nd Independence Day this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi remarked that India’s economy, once a sleeping elephant is now running. The same cannot, however be said about the healthcare system of India. This elephant is malnourished, weak, diseased and lumbering at...

-Scroll.in Untouchability was outlawed in 1950, but discrimination and segregation of the scheduled caste remains pervasive. Musahars, a Scheduled Caste that sections of Hindu society deem untouchable, are still being denied government entitlements such as state pensions and housing. The discrimination is blatant when it comes to accessing government healthcare in Badagaon administrative block of Varanasi district in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous province. The scourge of discrimination is so pervasive that...

-The Hindu The National Health Protection Scheme is disconnected from primary care. It also needs to be scaled up It is unusual for a health programme to become the most prominent feature of a Union Budget. The previous government missed the bus when it failed to implement the recommendations of the High-Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage (2011). Yet, those recommendations resonate in the Budget of 2018, with commitment to universal...

-The Indian Express The focus in the Union Budget on tertiary healthcare at the cost of primary and secondary healthcare is flawed. A publicly-financed health insurance scheme is no substitute If the past three Union budgets were any indication, this budget’s approach to the health sector should not have surprised anyone. The prescription in the National Health Policy (NHP) 2017 to increase the government’s (Centre and the states together) health expenditure from the...

-Frontline.in The Assembly elections have put under intense scrutiny Narendra Modi’s Gujarat model of development which is touted as worthy of replication throughout the country. Audit reports of the CAG provide ample evidence of it being inefficient, corrupt and not beneficial to the common people. THE standard indicators of development, as is understood in theory and practice, comprise a range of indices, and not necessarily the level of private investment in...