-Livemint.com India needs to find better value for money in the health sector According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are three goals a country’s health system must aim for: to improve health, to be responsive to legitimate demands of the population and to ensure no one is at risk of serious financial losses because of ill health. Given this framework, the fourth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) released last week...

-Business Standard Also for other programme impacting the non-urban economy, in the wake of two years of partial drought The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) seems likely to get its highest budgetary allocation since its launch a decade before. This allocation for 2016-17 could cross the previous highs of Rs 40,100 crore in the 2010-11 Budget and Rs 40,000 crore in 2011-12, by then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee. Actual spending...

Representatives of around 20 civil society organizations and NGOs met the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley as part of pre-budget consultation on social sector on 12 January, 2016. Immediately after the pre-budget consultation, a press conference was held by some of these organizations to convey the media persons what demands/ suggestions were made.   Subrat Das, Executive Director of Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA, http://www.cbgaindia.org/) informed us that during...

-Hindustan Times Chandigarh: First, the good news. Punjab has made a record contribution of rice to the central pool. During the 2015-16 crop season, the state contributed 93.5 lakh tonnes to the public distribution system (PDS). Now, the bad news. To grow one kilogram of rice, as many as 5,337 litres of water is required ‑ more than 260 buckets of 20-litre capacity. The water consumed by rice for the central pool...

-Business Standard Despite two consecutive years of deficient rains, farm growth was positive in Q2 of 2015-16 The India Meteorological Department (IMD) might have decided to drop the use of the word “drought” from its nomenclature, but even if it had not done so, it would have hardly made a difference. Studies show that Indian agriculture has, over the years, developed an inherent resistance to drought. The share of agriculture in the overall...