-The Indian Express All such investments will go a long way to augment farmers’ incomes in a sustainable manner. Else, I am afraid, much of the talk in the Union budget for agri-reforms will remain mere rhetoric. Although the Union budget is basically an accounting exercise of revenues and expenditures for the coming year, economy-watchers anxiously wait for the finance minister to announce major economic reforms. In that sense, the budget of...

-The Hindu Bengaluru: The NITI Aayog proposal to hand over district hospitals with 750 beds to private medical colleges, citing the public-private-pARTnership (PPP) arrangements in Karnataka and Gujarat, has come under severe criticism from health activists and doctors, who feel it will further compromise quality and access to healthcare, mainly for the poor. They have demanded that the move be dropped without further consultation. The Centre’s top think tank recently released for...

-The Hindu Rue the use of unaccounted money in next month’s Assembly elections New Delhi: Activists working for electoral reforms said they were disappointed on Monday when the Supreme Court declined to stay the electoral bond scheme of the government, saying that the anonymous donations to political pARTies through these bonds could continue for the Delhi Assembly elections next month. A founder of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), which had filed a...

-The Hindu Its success in getting universal coverage has lessons for India As Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro visits New Delhi this Republic Day, one interesting field of cooperation to explore in the strategic pARTnership is healthcare. Achieving universal health coverage is a very complex task, especially for developing countries. Here, the example of Brazil, the only country where more than 100 million inhabitants have a universal health system, is worth studying. It...

-The Hindu The present national accounting and analytical framework misses out on many key dimensions of a complex economy The new series of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures with 2011-12 as base, released in 2015, has not gone well with analysts; the withholding of employment-unemployment data for some time and consumer expenditure data, which is not released, added to this unease. Bringing the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) under the fold of...