Health ministry instead plans to roll out an integrated national health survey; experts question decision   The Union government has decided to discontinue the country’s most reliable and widely tracked health survey, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), the fourth round of which was to be conducted in 2012-13, in a move that has been criticized by development experts. The ministry of health and family welfare is instead planning to roll out an...

Two years after the Centre notified the Right of the Children to Free and Compulsory Act, 2009, which guarantees free education to children aged 6-14 years, Karnataka and Goa are yet to notify the rules. “Last year this time, only 15 States notified the RTE rules. Today, this number has increased to 21. The Ministry will continue to follow up with these States as notification would entitle them to funds from...

South Korean steel maker Posco may have to start its bid to enter India from scratch, letting six years of preparatory work go to waste. A top tribunal has cancelled environmental approvals given by the government last year for the company’s $12 billion (around Rs61,440 crore today) steel plant in Orissa and ordered that the environment ministry review the entire project afresh. The tribunal said environmental clearances have been accorded in...

-The Business Standard Searching for independent assessments of govt work The rural development ministry recently proposed “independent, real-time Evaluation” of the government’s flagship social welfare and development programmes, a suggestion that deserves attention not just for its pros, but also for its cons. It is true that given the explosive growth in social sector spending, effective monitoring and Evaluation are ever more important. The constant hum of charges that extra money is...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Budget 2012, built yet again at the altar of fiscal fundamentalism, will not convince anybody. In this era of immediate assessment it took just a few minutes for the Union Budget for 2012-13 to be given one or the other negative appellation – “lacklustre”, “anti-growth”, “back to the 1980s”, “without reform” and the like. Such Evaluations forget that union budgets have long since ceased to be statements of...