-The Hindu ‘Lacks vigour, won’t stand up to scrutiny’ The Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC) has released a detailed note enumerating its objections to former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian’s paper on India’s GDP growth. The note said that Mr. Subramanian’s paper “lacks rigour” and would not stand up to academic scrutiny. Lower GDP The paper, released in Harvard University, postulated that the GDP growth between 2011-17 was significantly lower than the 7%...

In a recent blog post, Columbia University professor Arvind Panagariya mentions that the critics of the present Prime Minister of India failed to underscore ‘employment rate’ -- flip side of unemployment rate -- that stood at nearly 94 percent according to the report on Periodic Labour Force Survey 2017-18. A recent ARTicle by Dr. Vikas Rawal and Prachi Bansal, however, points out that in order to understand the problem of joblessness...

-The Times of India While the state and Union governments are now scrambling to deal with the outbreak of acute encephalitis syndrome (AES) disease in Bihar's Muzaffarpur, official data shows the shocking state of the public health infrastructure in the district. The health ministry's health management information system (HMIS) shows that all of the 103 primary health centres (PHC) and the only community health centre in the district were not considered...

-The Hindu All it would have taken was to ensure that the children had a meal at night Along with my colleagues, I had investigated the so-called mystery disease in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, during its outbreak in 2012, 2013 and 2014. The local name for it was acute encephalitis syndrome, but we found that the disease was not encephalitis but encephalopathy. This distinction is important. Encephalitis results from a viral infection, unless proved...

-The Hindu Major drop seen in open defecation India has made great gains in providing basic sanitation facilities since the stART of the millennium, accounting for almost two thirds of the 650 million people globally who stopped practising open defecation between 2000 and 2017. However, a monitoring report by UN organisations released on Tuesday also shows that there has been absolutely no growth in the population with access to piped water facilities over...