-The Hindu Its success in getting universal coverage has lessons for India As Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro visits New Delhi this Republic Day, one interesting field of cooperation to explore in the strategic partnership is healthcare. Achieving universal health coverage is a very complex task, especially for developing countries. Here, the example of Brazil, the only country where more than 100 million inhabitants have a universal health system, is worth studying. It...

-The Hindu Supreme Court issues notice to Centre on the petition by a law student The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Centre to respond to a plea filed by a law student seeking the implementation of the Justice J.S. Verma Committee report on crime against women and children. The court issued notices to the government on a plea by B. Srinivas Goud, represented by advocates Ramaswami Balaji and Shravan Kumar, for...

-The Hindu Rue the use of unaccounted money in next month’s Assembly elections New Delhi: Activists working for electoral reforms said they were disappointed on Monday when the Supreme Court declined to stay the electoral bond scheme of the government, saying that the anonymous donations to political parties through these bonds could continue for the Delhi Assembly elections next month. A founder of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), which had filed a...

-The Hindu Bengaluru: The NITI Aayog proposal to hand over district hospitals with 750 beds to private medical colleges, citing the public-private-partnership (PPP) arrangements in Karnataka and Gujarat, has come under severe criticism from health activists and doctors, who feel it will further compromise quality and access to healthcare, mainly for the poor. They have demanded that the move be dropped without further consultation. The Centre’s top think tank recently released for...

-The Hindu The present national accounting and analytical framework misses out on many key dimensions of a complex economy The new series of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures with 2011-12 as base, released in 2015, has not gone well with analysts; the withholding of employment-unemployment data for some time and consumer expenditure data, which is not released, added to this unease. Bringing the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) under the fold of...