-The Indian Express Policy still hasn’t adjusted itself to address the crisis of agricultural produce deflation. India’s agricultural output grew by hardly 2.7 per cent during the last October-December quARTer. That isn’t bad, if one takes the corresponding year-on-year increases for the preceding 10 quARTers; these have ranged between 4.2 per cent and 7.5 per cent. The cause for concern is that these reasonably good production growth rates in “real” terms...

-The Indian Express The Indian Express has learnt that two inquiry reports into the issue, prepared by Women and Child Development DepARTment, were allegedly riddled with falsities, prompting Sisodia to lash out at the depARTment’s secretary over what he termed a “fraud”. New Delhi: Anganwadi registers were allegedly “fudged”, pages “pulled out” and pencil records “erased” and overwritten to falsely establish that three sisters aged 8, 4 and 2, who died...

-The Hindu Making hospitalisation affordable will spell relief, but there is no alternative to strengthening primary health care In 2011, a high-level expert group on universal health coverage reckoned that nearly 70% of government health spending should go to primary health care. The National Health Policy (NHP) 2017 also advocated allocating resources of up to two-thirds or more to primary care as it enunciated the goal of achieving “the highest possible level...

-The Indian Express This will be Ashok Khemka’s sixth transfer during current state BJP government which came to power in October 2014 in Haryana. This will also be his 52th transfer during 27-year service as an IAS officer. Hours after the publication of his interaction to The Indian Express on Aravallis land consolidation in which he had pointed out that “it will fuel the greed of land sharks”, Haryana’s BJP-led government...

-The Hindu Both human rights and wildlife rights groups have not used the Forest Rights Act as a conservation tool On February 13, the Supreme Court ordered the eviction of more than 10 lakh Adivasis and other forest dwellers from forestland across 17 States. The petitioners, mainly wildlife NGOs, had demanded that State governments evict those forest dwellers whose claims over traditional forestland under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers...