-TheWire.in The finance ministry can continue to quibble, but the stark fact is that decades of underspending in education and health may result in India wasting its demographic dividend. On October 11, the World Bank launched the latest of its country rankings: the Human Capital Index (HCI). The objective of the index is to show how low education and health outcomes – or human capital – impact productivity, growth and prosperity. The...

-Livemint.com Loan waivers and electricity subsidies are band-aids at best; a deeper transformation is needed The past few days have neatly summed up the scale and nature of the challenges facing India’s agriculture sector. First, the provisional agriculture census 2015-16 showed that landholdings have continued their decades-long trend of fragmentation, leading to a further rise in the proportion of small and marginal farmers. Then, 30,000 farmers, who had started their march from...

-Financial Express While recently releasing the book, Supporting Indian Farms the Smart Way by Ashok Gulati, Marco Ferroni and Yuan Zhou, Arun Jaitley remarked that India needs a good blend of Investments and subsidies in its agriculture policy. He said that, luckily, there are no severe constraints on resources to invest in rural areas, be it roads, water (irrigation), sanitation, and even housing. If he could include in this list of...

-The Indian Express A study by Seattle-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation published in The Lancet says that India’s ranking of 158th in 2016 represents an improvement from its 1990 ranking of 162nd. India ranks 158th in the world for its Investments in education and healthcare, a survey of 195 countries has revealed. It ranks below countries like Sudan, Azerbaijan, China and Bosnia Herzegovina. According to the survey, Finland tops the...

-Livemint.com The problem escalated due to the government’s focus on infrastructure during 2002-09, especially with the efforts made to promote public-private partnerships The past two years or so have seen rapidly increasing stress in the Indian banking sector, with non-performing assets (NPAs) steadily climbing from under 3% to over 13% of total assets. Loan-loss provisioning for NPAs has seriously eroded the capital base of several banks, limiting their ability to make further...