-The Telegraph New Delhi: Health and patients' rights groups have called on the government to resist American pressure that they claimed was aimed at weakening safeguards in India's patent laws that allow drug companies to sell inexpensive generic medicine. Health activists representing patients' rights said they were concerned that bilateral talks on intellectual property rights, to feature during US President Barack Obama's visit to India beginning this weekend, may be rigged against...
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Let’s remake the classroom -Rukmini Banerji and Esther Duflo
-The Indian Express The 10th edition of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) by Pratham, released last week, shows that over the last decade, basic learning levels for children in elementary school in India have remained low. Only about half of Class V children in rural India can read a simple Class II level text, and a similar proportion can do a two-digit subtraction problem with borrowing. While there are...
More »What has ten years of RTI achieved? -Pamela Philipose
-The Tribune The biggest lesson of the last 10 years since the Right to Information Act came into force is that Indian democracy, if it has to be meaningful, has to have a strong, effective RTI regime. That regime has to be equally owned by those who govern and those who are governed. TEN years after the Right to Information Act promised the country a "practical regime of right to information for...
More »Cash transfers, the lazy short cut -Mihir Shah
-The Hindu Alleviating poverty in India requires not only cash transfers but also other enabling changes Advocates of unconditional cash transfers claim that they can be both emancipatory and transformative. They argue that people are quite capable of making rational decisions. And that this kind of basic income support can improve their lives. I have no quarrel with the claim that we must trust the poor. Such suspicion is part of an elite...
More »Revisiting rural indebtedness - CP Chandrasekhar
-Frontline The problem in rural India is not one of too much credit to poor households that leads to debt waivers that damage bank balance sheets, but one of inadequate access to credit from formal sources. IF Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan is to be believed, efforts to help Indian farmers by providing them with cheap(er) credit and relieving them of an unsustainable debt burden only harms them in the...
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