-The Indian Express The Congress may be quick to attack the ruling NDA government for attempting to dilute the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) since it came to power, and for its poor implementation this year, but the high-profile constituencies of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and party vice-president Rahul Gandhi have performed dismally under the scheme, ranking below the national average on most key parameters. MGNREGA, introduced in...

-The Hindustan Times The drafting of the National Health Policy (NHP) 2015 is an extremely welcome development. The government's decision to announce Health as a Right is a huge advance. Public health spending as a share of GDP barely rose from 0.9 to 1.1% under the previous government. Governments in rich countries have been spending 5% of GDP on health for decades. Why should we welcome the NHP 2015? Countries with...

-Economic and Political Weekly The release of the independent Annual Status of Education Report has become an annual event, bringing attention to the status of learning amongst children in Rural India. An examination of the 2014 report looks at the representation of data within the binary of government vs private schooling, as well as the silence of the report on the quality of private schools, and highlights the need to move...

-The Hindu In the present state of the economy, when there is excess capacity in manufacturing, adequate stocks of foodgrain and the inflation rate is trending downwards, there is an opportune moment for a public investment-centred fiscal expansion Over the past eight months, the government has issued some strong statements on the economy and taken some bold steps aimed at transforming it. As it prepares to present its first real budget we...

Any change in the Public Distribution System (PDS) needs to be undertaken with extreme caution since it is likely to affect the food security of 50 percent of India's population. This has been stated by National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in a recent research brief. The note from NCAER is based on India Human Development Survey (2011-12) data. In the IHDS, nearly 42,000 households from 33 states and...