-The Telegraph   New Delhi: Jharkhand's blooming lotus has a not-so-hidden thorny challenge.   The state, which has rewarded the BJP and the Narendra Modi government with 12 MPs, has also thrown the new Gopinath Munde-headed rural development minister a MGNREGS zinger. Along with Odisha and Bihar, Jharkhand is at the bottom of the bucket list of states as far as the actual expenditure of funds under the national job guarantee scheme goes. In each of...

The latest WHO report entitled World Health Statistics 2014 delineates the performance made on the health front by India vis-à-vis other nations between 1990 and 2012. It also presents the challenges that the new government at the Centre should try to resolve. In India, life expectancy at birth (both sexes, in years) has increased from 58 in 1990 to 66 in 2012. While life expectancy at birth for men rose from 57...

-Down to Earth   As India elects new government, the 12th Five Year Plan may no longer be pro-poor MUCH hope is pinned on the 12th Five Year Plan that was declared as the first health Plan by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, while drafting the Plan, also termed it "pro-poor" and promised the maximum budget for social welfare schemes. But as the Plan comes into force this...

-The Business Standard   A seven-point agenda to fix India's public services, and overcome poorly designed systems India's Achilles Heel remains its inability to deliver public services. India's aspiration to be a global economic power will be unrealised if this remains unsolved. Why is this problem so particularly acute? Is it political interference and corruption, poorly designed programmes and weak administration? Or a much deeper cultural problem of aversion to collective action, often...

-Down to Earth   Poverty line figures hide people's aspirations There are lies, damn lies and statistics, American author Mark Twain once wrote echoing a similar statement by the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli. Statistics aim to reveal a lot, but they conceal vital information. This concealing tendency of statistics explains much of the flak received by the Planning Commission when it released figures on the poverty line. In 2012, the commission announced that...