While welcoming the report of the High Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage for India for its comprehensive vision and many well-conceived recommendations, this article focuses on the conditions needed for its promise to bear fruit. Towards this, it explores the political dimension, which comprises the forces and interests that come into play to shape and reconfigure administrative policy and its implementation.   We are grateful to Anand Zachariah and Susie...

-The Business Standard Moving forward on sanitation will require big ideas National shame” is how most people, including some senior government functionaries, often refer to the pervasive practice of open defecation. Yet, the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), launched in 1991 with the noble objective of providing access to hygienic toilets for all by 2012, receives only scant attention from the government. The latest assessment indicates that as many as 22 states will...

On September 18, Bimola Rai’s world was reduced to rubble. A student of Class III in Bop village in Chungthang block of North District in Sikkim, a Himalayan border state, she was left traumatized when a devastating earthquake of 6.9 magnitude on the Richter scale, flattened her home and school building, located at an altitude of 5,500 feet. Today, Bimola joins 26 other children of her village to walk the four...

Hindutva continues to be the main agenda of the BJP in Karnataka, as is evident from the cattle slaughter Bill. THE Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged as the single largest party in the Assembly elections and managed to form the government in Karnataka in 2008. The electoral victory encouraged the hard-line elements in the party and organisations with Hindutva affiliation to advance their ideology in a spirited manner and stoke communal...

In Chhattisgarh, Hindutva manifests itself in the form of attacks on Christians; in Uttarakhand it does so in the form of promoting Sanskrit. IN Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand, States ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindutva agenda may not be strident, but the Sangh Parivar orientation is unmistakable in various government policies and programmes. While in Uttarakhand the party places much emphasis on gau mata (bovine goddess) and the teaching of...