-Outlook Admission attained, it's not easy progress for EWS children Every day, at 7:15 am, Prachi's mother walks the six-year-old to her school in Pune, walking cautiously past the corner of the road, to avoid the giant SUVs and sedans zipping past after dropping the wards at the fortress-like school complex. Prachi enters the school with a few other children from her neighbourhood, a colony of waste-pickers. Prachi's mother is one...

- Economic and Political Weekly Universalising health coverage is the current goal of the health service system in India. Tax-funded insurance for Poor families is the method chosen for attaining this objective. The Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana was rolled out in 2008 for households below the poverty line, enabling them to access health services in the public and private sectors. However, experience from different countries shows tax-funded insurance systems work well...

-PTI New Delhi: With sowing of kharif crops almost completed, the total area planted to all summer crops including rice and pulses remains lower at 96.62 million hectare from the year-ago due to Poor monsoon. While sowing of pulses, oilseeds, coarse cereals, cotton, sugarcane and jute has completed, the planting of rice would end by next month. As per data released by the Agriculture Ministry, the total area under all kharif crops stands...

-The Business Standard Against NDA's 75 million target, UPA added 61 million in 2013-14 The government's financial inclusion scheme, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, is an empty shell at the moment. The government heralded its achievement of clocking 15 million new bank accounts under the scheme by Thursday and looked ahead to the target of achieving 75 million accounts by January 2015. In fact, given that the UPA government added an additional 60.9...

-The Hindu Providing access to credit likely to be a hard step For Prime Minister Narendra Modi's newly launched Jan Dhan Yojana to be successful, India needs to provide over 100 million households access to banks, data show. An even harder step, however, is likely to be access to credit. As of March 2012, the most recent year for which relevant Reserve Bank of India (RBI) statistics are available, India had over 900...