-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre's proposed rates of reimbursement to hospitals for various medical procedures under the National Health Protection Scheme are low and unsustainable and could compromise patient safety, an organisation representing hospitals has told the government. The Association of Healthcare Providers of India (AHPI) has said the proposed rates are in general significantly lower than the costs that large tertiary-care hospitals typically incur on medical procedures.     The NHPS, announced...

-Civil Society News New Delhi: In 1974, Dr Samir Chaudhuri, a paediatrician working in Kolkata’s slums, founded Child in Need Institute (CINI) to tackle the many dimensions of child malnutrition. It struck him at the time that malnutrition wasn’t just a clinical problem but a complex phenomenon rooted in gender issues. Over the years, led by Dr Chaudhuri, CINI developed deep understanding of the social, economic and political underpinnings of malnutrition...

-Livemint.com The issue of frequent hikes in fuel prices is a matter of debate and concern, law and justice minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said after a Union cabinet meeting New Delhi: The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government on Wednesday signalled its intent to stay the course on fuel pricing reforms and said that it was working toward a “long-term solution”. This comes against the backdrop of an international crude oil price rally, with...

-The Indian Express Women form 80 per cent of urban migrants, but public policy is blind to their concerns. A recent UN report says India is on the “brink of an urban revolution”, as its population in towns and cities are expected to reach 600 million by 2031. Fuelled by migration, megacities of India (Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata) will be among the largest urban concentrations in the world. Interestingly, the 2011 Census...

  One of the salient features of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005) is that there are provisions in it to ensure transparency and accountability. Section 17(2) of the MGNREGA says that the gram sabha shall conduct regular social audits of all the projects under the scheme taken up within the gram panchayat (GP). In addition to that, Section 17(3) of the MGNREGA states that the GP shall make...