-The New Indian Express A significant share, almost two-thirds of OOP expenses, are for purchasing outpatient care, especially medicines. NEW DELHI: Household Out-Of-Pocket (OOP) expenses on health services, especially medicines, continue to push over 55 million people in India into poverty, with over 18 per cent of households incurring catastrophic levels of health expenditures annually, says a WHO report. Despite India’s billing as the ‘pharmacy of the world,’ its population’s access to medicines...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-Hindustan Times The highly-anticipated report will assess climate adaptation and the impacts of climate change, looking at ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels. A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is to be released on February 28 will be important for India, experts said, because it focuses on vulnerability and adaptation to climate crisis. The highly-anticipated report will assess climate adaptation and the impacts of...

-The Hindu India’s poor AOI is a stark reminder of the need to attain a key sustainable development goal of higher agri-growth While the overall budgetary allocation towards the agricultural sector has marginally increased by 4.4% in the Union Budget 2022-23, the rate of increase is lower than the current inflation rate of 5.5%-6%. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) report for 2001 to 2019 shows that,...

-The Hindu Audits, transparency and citizen-centric accountability need to be a part of fund support and disbursement Every COVID-19 wave in India has brought us face to face with the dire precarity of life and livelihood for India’s vast numbers of unorganised workers, and the inadequate response of the state and society to their plight. The latest global OXFAM inequality report highlights how India’s billionaires have grown dramatically in numbers and wealth,...