-The Business Standard What must replace the Planning Commission An announcement of note in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Independence Day speech from the ramparts of Red Fort was the much-anticipated end of the Planning Commission. A full 23 years after India ushered in reforms that reduced emphasis on central planning, the crucially important organisation of the statist era will finally be dismantled. Both as signalling and as policy, this needs to be...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's poorest and socially underprivileged people seem to have benefited the least from a set of government programmes launched over the past decade to reduce personal expenses on health care, research suggests. A team of health economists has found that the financial burden of health care on India's poorest 20 per cent, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Muslims has outpaced that on the richest 20 per cent and...

-PTI Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan has dismissed the notion that the rural employment guarantee programme is behind the massive spurt in wages in rural areas. "On the NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), there is clearly a lot of sense that this has increased rural wages tremendously. I would argue that clean, trustworthy studies say that the effect was may be 10 per cent," Rajan told an audience here last week. It...

-Ecnomic and Political Weekly Despite recent improvements in the maternal health scenario in rural Assam, it remains the state with the highest number of maternal deaths in the country. Institutional delivery, antenatal care, and postnatal care have been actively promoted by the state to deal with the situation. However, state policies are still incongruously geared towards addressing the issue without taking sufficient note of the various sociocultural impediments in the way...

-The Indian Express New body must retain the Commission's mechanisms for Centre-state discussion The prime minister spoke from the ramparts of the Red Fort this morning, putting to rest all speculation about the future of the Planning Commission. I write as a member of 10 years standing of this apex think-tank. The Planning Commission was the brainchild of Jawaharlal Nehru, who created it by cabinet order; it has no legislative sanction. Prime...