-The Hindu Ex-official says priority setting in India is based on consultation, not evidence. Bangkok: India faces serious challenges in implementing universal health coverage policies because of a “serious knowledge gap” among policy-makers and a “general unwillingness for change”, Rakesh Srivastava, former Director-General of Health Service, says. At a session on “Enabling better decisions for better health: embedding fair & systematic processes into priority setting for universal health coverage” here, Mr. Srivastava said...

-Economic and Political Weekly Health and nutrition indicators have improved, but remain unacceptably low. After a hiatus of a decade, we now have up-to-date information on the health and nutrition status of the population. Preliminary results for 13 states and two union territories of the much awaited National Family Health Survey–4 (NFHS–4) which was conducted in 2015–16—the first after NFHS–3 of 2005–06—have just been released. In a welcome development, NFHS–4, for the...

  A French journalist once wrote: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Perhaps the same can be said about nutritional status of children in West Bengal at present in comparison to the past. At the time when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, was entertaining private capital in Singur and Nandigram, the rate of undernutrition was quite high in his state. A little less than...

-Scroll.in By one estimate 1.4 crore households have been re-designated as Above Poverty Line during the Rajasthan government’s drive to trim the list of PDS beneficiaries. As the afternoon sun bore down, Naujibai Bhil waited for her turn outside the public grievance office in Rajasthan’s Rajsamand district. “The sarpanch cancelled my red ration card and replaced it with a blue one,” said the adivasi woman from Daang Ke Vaas village, holding her head...

-The Hindu The public now sees the Internet not just in market terms, but as a social phenomenon that requires public interest regulation. In its aggressive campaign for Free Basics, couched in simplistic developmental language, Facebook underestimated the political sophistication of the Indian public. It must be regretting it now. The social networking service’s reportedly Rs. 100-crore campaign, through double full-page newspaper advertisements, billboards and television, appears simply to have congealed public...