-TheWire.in With a large number of units in the unorganised sector closing down and few providing residential facilities to workers, many have already started leaving. New Delhi: As the Delhi government announced a six-day lockdown from Monday to combat the spread of COVID-19, a large number of migrant workers began leaving for their home towns and villages – bringing back memories of a similar crisis in March 2020. Workers fear that the...

-Livemint.com Panel on doubling farm incomes proposes shifting from supply-led to demand-led production system New Delhi: The government should undertake a radical overhaul of the agriculture ecosystem by moving from a supply-push production system to a demand-led one, according to a committee set up by the centre to recommend strategies to double farmer incomes by 2022. The agriculture ministry should also set up an “empowered committee” to operationalize and monitor progress of doubling...

-The Hindu For state-sponsored insurance, governments should avoid insurance companies World Bank data, in 2015, showed that nearly 65% of health-care expenditure in India is “Out of Pocket” (OoP). A report by the World Health Organisation has shown that around 3.2% of Indians would fall below the poverty line because of high OoP health expenditure. Thus, a national health insurance scheme like the Ayushman Bharat is welcome. While the principle of insuring a...

-The Hindu They matter because they sustain social practices without which human life is neither worthwhile nor indeed possible There is much talk these days about the decline in our institutions. Aren’t they failing to perform, being systematically undermined, even destroyed? On the one hand, people are heard lamenting that our courts are compromised, that our Parliament is dysfunctional, or that our higher education is in a mess. On the other hand,...

-Scroll.in To spend 2.5% of GDP on healthcare by 2025, the centre and state governments must increase healthcare allocation by 24% over the same period of time. Healthcare needs continue to cause financial hardship to people across India. The National Health Accounts 2014-’15 report reveals that more than two-thirds of total spending on health (67%) is household out-of-pocket expenditure. The report tracks how much money is spent on health and how money...