It's official now. At the primary healthcare level, there is no difference in the performance of MBBS doctors with five-and-a-half years' training and non-physician clinicians with three years' training who have been called "legal quacks" by the Indian Medical Association (IMA). This has been demonstrated through a study conducted in Chhattisgarh that compared the performance of different types of clinical care providers at the primary care level. Following the controversy...

A task force, set up by the agriculture ministry, has recommended a slew of measures to increase India’s stagnating grain production. The panel has advised adoption of new technologies, water conservation and more efficient water management, especially in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh—known as ‘the food bowl of India’. The task force also suggests taking green revolution to the eastern region. It is hopeful that the measures would check...

Dams may have been the temples of modern India to Jawaharlal Nehru, but Uttarakhand’s BJP government has stopped work on a hydel project because priests and devotees fear it might submerge a Kali temple. The government’s surprise move on Thursday on the 400MW Alakananda project is steeped in local politics and coincides with a countrywide debate on development-versus-environment. But it also highlights how easy it has become to block power projects in...

The Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, has proposed that organised sector employers be mandated to initiate jointly funded health insurance cover for their employees. In the process he has flagged off what should be a major debate. As the Indian state raises its abysmally low expenditure on health care, should it all go into better funding of the public health-care system or should a part of...

Under ideal conditions, grain storage options in India are built up from the buffer stock strategies. These, in turn, are derived from fluctuations in grain output and the need to ride through, say, two bad years. To the needs of the required buffer are added the demands from operational requirements and those of grains in transit. Once upon a time, there used to be controversies concerning why should we separately account...