-TheWire.in Why has India chosen the path of expanding medical insurance instead of a more comprehensive approach to health? The concern with rising inequities in access to medical care, rising out-of-pocket expenditures and unmet treatment needs have been addressed with yet another targeted medical insurance scheme for poor households. The idea of a targeted medical insurance is not new. Several southern states like Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka had introduced such schemes many...

-Hindustan Times The Atal Bhujal Yojana will be launched in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh The government has finalised the contours of a Rs 6,000-crore scheme to tackle the country’s depleting groundwater level, almost a year-and-a-half after finance minister Arun Jaitley announced the plan in the Union Budget. Called the Atal Bhujal Yojana (ABY) and piloted by the Union water resources ministry, the scheme now needs the cabinet’s...

-TheWire.in This is the last full budget of the present government and the last opportunity for it to demonstrate its commitment to India’s health and nutrition. Slow improvements in basic indicators of maternal and child mortality, double burden of communicable as well as non-communicable diseases, high out-of-pocket expenditure, a failing public sector and heavily commercialised private sector characterise the healthcare crisis in India. The year 2017 saw a number of incidents in the...

  Budgetary allocation to a particular sector indicates how much priority the government assigns to that sector as compared to the rest. A preliminary analysis by the Inclusive Media for Change team indicates that the actual expenditure (net of receipts and recoveries) by two of the country’s most important ministries, namely the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (MoAFW) and the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) was less than 1 percent...

-Down to Earth The average agricultural growth has reached its lowest in the last four years to 1.9 per cent While presenting Union Budget 2017-18, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley gave much emphasis on farmers. He even announced an increased budget outlay for agriculture, which made media houses declare it as a budget for rural India. Soon, the dust settled down and reality came to the surface. The budget was increased by...