-The Indian Express India’s healthcare debate should go back to the 40-year-old declaration that accords centrality to the local medical worker. India’s healthcare crisis has evoked a policy debate with arguments being made in favour of and against the public and private sector. S.N. Mohanty (‘Fixing healthcare’, IE, November 11) summarises the arguments of both sides very well. He concludes that there is a need to “design the public health system around...

-Scroll.in At the heart of the problem is a discrepancy between two laws on rights for Adivasis to the bamboo growing on their traditional forestlands. Across the world, taxonomists have classified bamboo as a grass. But under Indian law, it was treated as a tree. This definition has long given state forest departments monopolistic control over the valuable natural resource. On November 23, the central government loosened this grip by amending the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Authority of India (UIDAI) has ordered an investigation against Bharti Airtel for alleged violations of the Aadhaar Act and is threatening to slap a financial penalty for opening Airtel Payments Bank accounts of customers surreptitiously while carrying out Aadhaar verification of their mobile numbers. The probe against the company was ordered after complaints of prima facie violations were found to be valid, sources told TOI. "The...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Two finance ministry departments, the Election Commission and the Reserve Bank have no information on the consultations over electoral bonds the Centre introduced nine months ago and touted as a "game-changing" decision to clean up political funding, an RTI query has revealed. RTI activist Venkatesh Nayak had sought from the department of economic affairs (DEA), a wing of the finance ministry, details of the number of representations it...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Most households covered by government-funded health insurance have to use personal funds to pay for hospitalisation, a study has suggested, iterating concerns about the wisdom of deploying public-funded insurance schemes to seek universal health coverage in India. The study, designed to determine how well government-funded health insurance protects households from health expenditure, has found that 66 per cent of such households who sought healthcare in public hospitals and...