-Economic and Political Weekly The platform known as the JAM Trinity (an acronym for Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar and mobile numbers) may enable a shift from the current Public Distribution System, based on price subsidies, to the direct transfer of benefits. However, it is incorrect to argue that JAM technologies will necessarily lead to the demise of the PDS. State-level experiences of computerisation, recounted here, reveal that the same technologies can...
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Nutrition, effective cash transfers: How to ensure social protection -Ashim Choudhury
-Hindustan Times Small and marginal farmers comprise 85% of the land holdings in India. Social protection is a survival tool for the rural poor, who have no easy access to wage labour. India recognised the need for social protection early on and introduced a slew of social protection programmes like the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) provides 100 days of assured labour wages...
More »Emphasis on cereals prime cause of high pulse prices -Rajeev Deshpande & Dipak Kumar Dash
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The current spike in pulse prices could have been anticipated, but India's cereal-centric food security policies emphasize rice and wheat while dis-incentivizing the production of pulses despite clear trends that show a declining preference for cereals. Even though India's dependency on imported pulses grew as imports rose from 2.7 million tonnes in 2010-11 to over four million tonnes this year, minimum support price-driven procurement and the...
More »Giving immunisation a shot in the arm -Ramanan Laxminarayan
-The Hindu Business Line That’s the mission Indradhanush has undertaken, so that India’s children get a better chance at life A shot in the arm is all it takes to protect our children from numerous life-threatening diseases. Five lakh children die every year due to vaccine-preventable diseases; 95 lakh are at risk because they are unimmunised or partially immunised. The figures are unacceptable for an immunisation programme which has been operational for...
More »Over 47k crimes against Dalits in 2014, 21 killed in Haryana: NCRB -Bharti Jain
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Rahul Gandhi may claim that Dalits are being increasingly Targeted under the present dispensation but statistics put out by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) during the last few years when UPA was in power show that crimes against Scheduled Castes rose almost steadily to 47,064 in 2014 from 39,408 in 2013 (19%), 33,655 in 2012 (17%), 33,719 in 2011, 32,712 in 2010 and 33,594 in...
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