-The Hindu On Saturday, tur was selling at an average official rate of Rs.178 per kg and urad at Rs.154 per kg in retail markets. Still grappling with high prices of pulses, particularly tur and urad, the Centre on Saturday asked the States to make cheaper lentils available to consumers, particularly the vulnerable sections, through the Public Distribution System. It has asked the States to indicate their requirement of pulses for distribution through...

-The Hindu They are in favour of multilateral trading systems. India and Africa said on Friday that the two partners are aligned on the outstanding issues at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and are in favour of multilateral trading systems. “The WTO Ministerial scheduled for December in Nairobi will be held for the first time in Africa where we will be looking for outcomes that will be of interest to both India and...

-The Hindu An evaluation of the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) has concluded that the government-financed health insurance scheme had little or no impact on medical impoverishment in India. In fact, the study found that despite high enrolment in RSBY, catastrophic health expenditures (when medical expenses push a family into poverty), hospitalisation expenditure and the percentage of total household outgo on out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses — medicines and other consumables that are not...

-The Indian Express Scapegoating ‘hoarders’ and ‘speculators’ for the spike in dal prices might have been effective in the 1960s. But today, it is only evidence of a rather sloppy conceptual policy framework. The pulse rate of a normal and healthy human body hovers between 60 and 100 beats per minute. There can be problems if it goes any higher — and a serious threat to life over 200 beats per...

-The Indian Express Indian healthcare providers need to get serious about infection control. A deadly strain of bacterium has doubled its resistance to last-resort antibiotics within a year, according to the report “State of the World’s Antibiotics, 2015”. By an estimate, antimicrobial resistance — the ability of bugs to outwit antibiotics — will claim two million lives in India by 2050, a fifth of the total. India is under pressure to curb...