-The Hindu The PMJDY celebrates success on its website, but thousands of Marys remain outside the banking system. This won’t change unless the scheme alters both design and implementation A few months ago, when the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) was still being spoken of as a success for the largest number of accounts opened in a day, earning the government a Guinness world record, I visited the branch of a...
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Monsoon deficit grows to 10% on poor August rains, raises drought fears -Amit Bhattacharya & Vishwa Mohan
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Below-par rainfall across India for more than two weeks has pushed the monsoon deficit to 10% below normal, increasing worries of a second successive drought year in the country. Average all-India rainfall was 5% below normal at the beginning of August but had doubled by Independence Day due to rains remaining consistently below average during the fortnight. August so far has seen 17% below-normal rain. A shortfall...
More »Falling Sick, Paying the Price: NSS 71st Round on Morbidity and Costs of Healthcare -T Sundararaman and VR Muraleedharan
-Economic and Political Weekly The decennial National Sample Survey on health and education provides useful information on the health and education of the population. The summary report on health from the 71st round conducted in 2014 allows us to make an initial assessment of three sets of issues. One, the trends in morbidity rates and patterns of morbidity, two, the effectiveness of the public sector in ensuring access to healthcare, and...
More »India stands alone on ‘name & shame’ policy -Atul Thakur
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The government's announcement that it would maintain a publicly available database of sex offenders is being portrayed as a significant step in addressing the threat posed by criminals whose crimes largely go unreported and hence encourage them to repeat the offence. It also addresses the general perception that such criminals tend to repeat their act and hence need to be monitored. A look at laws in other...
More »The slaughter of suicide data -P Sainath
-Frontline Changing the way you count changes the count. THE total number of farmer suicides in the country since 1995 crossed the 3,00,000-mark in 2014. However, the 2014 data are not comparable with 19 earlier years of farm suicide data. This is because of major changes in the methodology of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). With the new parameters, the number of farmer suicides in 2014 falls to 5,650. That is...
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