-TheWire.in India’s jump in the ‘Doing Business’ rankings turns out to be mostly an “artefact of methodological changes”, according to a report by the Centre for Global Development. New Delhi: The Centre for Global Development (CDG), a US-based think-tank that studies global poverty and inequality, has dismissed India’s spectacular jump on the World Bank’s latest ease of doing business index as misleading, saying it is largely due to changes in the methodology...

-ThePrint.in The larger lesson is clear: in an era when the Congress & the BJP can agree on next to nothing, they will gladly join hands to save their own skin. Among all the talk of the aam aadmi focus emerging from last week’s Budget, many people may have missed one of its most self-serving acts. This manoeuvre found no mention in the Union Finance Minister’s presentation itself, but was instead buried...

-The Indian Express Budget’s bias toward privately-delivered care undermines universal health coverage Until about four decades ago, specialist healthcare (secondary and tertiary care) was largely a province of public hospitals, and the private sector largely kept itself to the provision of generalist healthcare. This underwent a transformation with the rise of the advanced medical interventions comprising tertiary-care medicine like organ transPLAntation and open heart surgery. Given these highly-profitable medical advances, the private...

-The Hindu Policy should address credit, crop insurance, drip irrigation The government’s efforts to focus on the welfare of farmers in the Union Budget is admirable. However, in a zero-sum situation such as budget allocation, the government often finds itself trying to choose between short-term results and long-term benefits. Short term results might come with loan waivers and increase of Minimum Support Price (MSP), but care should be taken to address the...

-The Times of India CHANDIGARH: The farm crisis is something more than a minimum support price (MSP) issue, said Ramon Magsaysay award winner and renowned journalist P Sainath, who was at Institute for Development and Communication to deliver a public lecture on inequality and agrarian distress on Monday. The agrarian crisis, Sainath said, is no more a measurement of input cost. It is not just the measure of the loss of...