-The Hindu Making hospitalisation affordable will spell relief, but there is no alternative to strengthening primary health care In 2011, a high-level expert group on universal health coverage reckoned that nearly 70% of government health spending should go to primary health care. The National Health Policy (NHP) 2017 also advocated allocating resources of up to two-thirds or more to primary care as it enunciated the goal of achieving “the highest possible level...

-The Hindu Both human rights and wildlife rights groups have not used the Forest Rights Act as a conservation tool On February 13, the Supreme Court ordered the eviction of more than 10 lakh Adivasis and other forest dwellers from forestland across 17 States. The petitioners, mainly wildlife NGOs, had demanded that State governments evict those forest dwellers whose claims over traditional forestland under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers...

-The Hindu GUWAHATI: The Indian Army, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Border Security Force (BSF) have never had a problem counting these soldiers as their own and deploying them to protect the country’s borders from the frozen reaches of the Siachen glacier to militancy hit Kashmir or to combat home-grown insurgents. But these battle-hardened men from a western Assam village have struggled for years to overcome a bigger threat...

-The Indian Express There are substantial inequalities even within Dalits. In addition to the 15 per cent quota, the community should also have reservation based on socioeconomic criteria. Reservations are sometimes criticised in a constructive manner by analysts who argue that quotas are cornered by a few jatis at the expense of those who “really need them”. Among Dalits, the Jatavs of Uttar Pradesh and the Mahars of Maharashtra have been...

-The Hindu Experts and activists say the complex problem cannot be prevented merely by monetary handouts meant to retain girls in school Kolkata: Dipali, Manju and Sahanara (names changed) were all beneficiaries of West Bengal’s most talked about conditional cash transfer scheme, Kanyashree. However, despite being beneficiaries of the scheme, which according to the State government has 56.09 lakh beneficiaries so far, these three young women were trafficked between 2016-18. Of the three trafficking...