Front Page / NATIONAL [The Hindu]
[1]. Law coming to enforce dam safety regulations
Editorial/OPINION [The Hindu]
[1]. Superpower dreams
[2]. Breathing life into health care
Economy [The Hindu]
[1]. Bankruptcy board spells out ‘eligibility’
Indian Express
[1]. A half cure
Live Mint
[1]. Big Data firms are not immune to disruption
Front Page / NATIONAL
[1]. Law coming to enforce dam safety regulations
Context
- The Centre is contemplating an institutional mechanism to improve safety in India’s 5300-odd dams
- Large reservoirs and water storage structures, in the past few decades, are not safe
What has happened?
Old: Currently, guidelines in this regard are not effectively enforced by the States
New Law:
The new law, which has been vetted (examined critically) by the Union Law Ministry will now go to the Union Cabinet for approval.
According to the new law:
- Central authority and State-level bodies that will enforce regulation
- Dam and project proponents falling short could face a fine, though they are unlikely to face imprisonment
Dangerous Waters
- Kerala, continues to fight with Tamil Nadu over threats posed by the Mullaperiyar dam on the river Periyar
- The Chennai floods of 2015, due to unusually-heavy winter rains, were thought to have been compounded by an unprecedented release of water from the Chembarambakkam dam into the Adyar River
- In 2014, an unscheduled release of water from the Larji hydroelectric project into the Beas river drowned 25 students from Hyderabad
- The 1979 Machchu dam failure in Morbi, Gujarat, is estimated to have killed at least 25,000
Safety Criteria
The safety criteria include:
- Increasing the spillway (a design structure to ease water build-up) and preventing ‘over-topping’ in which the dam overflows and causes it to fail
The Government
- Recent analysis of the state of India’s dams found that half of them did not meet contemporary safety standards
- This does not mean the dams are unsafe, but that we have much stricter safety criteria now than we did when these dams were built 50 or 100 years ago
Editorial/OPINION
[1]. Superpower dreams
Context
India’s response to a low HDI rank must be good education and a higher health outlay
What has happened?
India’s rank of 131 among 188 countries on the UNDP’s Human Development Index for 2015 and its ‘medium’ performance
Question Posed
Would not the score have been significantly better if the higher economic growth trajectory of two and a half decades of liberalisation had been accompanied by a parallel investment in people?
Reality Check
- The HDI data show, significant inequalities persist, particularly between States and regions, which act as major barriers to improvement
- The percentage of women in the workforce is the lowest in India among the BRICS countries
- The national record on the population that lives in severe multidimensional poverty is also the worst in the bloc
Impact: Lost decades for India, when universalisation of education and health care could have pulled deprived sections out of the poverty trap
Reasons
Rise in income:
- Hasnot translated into a higher quality of life for many Indians
- It raised overall life expectancy at birth by more than 10 years from the 1990 level, to reach 68.3 years
Rise in Awareness
- Progress has also been made in raising awareness about issues affecting women’s empowerment, such as public safety, acid attacks, discrimination in inheritance rights and lack of equal employment opportunity
- Policy reforms have been instituted in some of these areas
What needs to be Done
A central focus on social indicators is necessary for India to break free from its position as an underachiever
- Economics
- The fiscal space now available has been strengthened by steady economic growth, and more should be done to eliminate subsidies for the richest quintile (any of five equal groups into which a population can be divided according to the distribution of values of a particular variable) — estimated by the UNDP to be $16 billion in 2014 in six consumption areas including gold and aviation fuel
- The rise in revenues from all sources should go towards making public education of high standards accessible to all and delivering on the promised higher budgetary outlay for health care
- Bolstered by a conscious effort to help traditionally backward regions, such policies will help eliminate the losses produced by inequalities that lower national human development indices
- State of Democracy:
- Access to justice is not yet ideal
- India has not ratified UN conventions on torture, rights of migrant workers and their families, and protection against enforced disappearance
This is a serious lacuna for a country that otherwise has a commitment to democracy and the rule of law
Conclusion
- With the growing realisation that development is a multidimensional achievement, the gains of economic reforms must help build capabilities and improve the health of all sections
- Sustaining and improving the quality of life will depend on policies crafted to handle major emerging challenges such as urbanisation, the housing deficit, access to power, water, education and health care
[2]. Breathing life into health care
Context
The new National Health Policy is promising, but it needs stronger Centre-State coordination
What has happened?
The new National Health Policy (2017) released presents a clear vision of how India’s sluggish health system can be galvanised to deliver health and well-being to all by 2030, to meet the Sustainable Development Goal on health
The Policy
A rise in spending
- Commitment to strengthening the public health sector
- The policy aims to draw upon the diverse systems of medicine and the different sectors of health-care providers for providing much-needed health services across India
- Need for increase in public health financing acknowledged (must spend 5% of GDP by 2025)
- The promise to double public financing over next eight years
- For States: recommendation of spending on health must rise above 8% of their budgets by 2020
- Primary health care prioritised for two-thirds or more of all public funding
- Primary health services to be available anywhere in the country on the basis of a family card:
- Also connecting them to a ‘health and wellness centre’ that provides basic services, referral linkages and performs a gatekeeper function for advanced care
- AYUSH (The Department of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy)systems would be mainstreamed
- The much-delayed National Urban Health Mission is to be imparted speed and scale to address the unmet needs of urban primary health care while reaching out to the urban poor
- Secondary and tertiary health care will be provided through strengthened public services, with gap filling through strategic purchasing of services from private providers
- While a ‘capitation’ fee model — of fixed annual payment for full health care of a person — has been proposed for primary health care, a ‘fee for service’ system has been proposed for secondary and tertiary care.
Strengthening health care
- District hospitals are to be strengthened, to provide several elements of tertiary care alongside secondary care
- Sub-district hospitals too would be upgraded
- A National Healthcare Standards Organization is proposed to be established to develop evidence-based standard management guidelines
- A National Health Information Network also would be established by 2025
- A National Digital Health Authority would be set up to develop, deploy and regulate digital health across the continuum of care
- Expanded institutional capacity as well as new courses and cadres are proposed to overcome the shortages of skilled human resources in the health system
- Public Health Management cadres are to be created in all States
- BSc in Community Health and MD in Family Medicine are marked for scale-up and a variety of specialised nursing and paramedical courses are proposed, even as Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) can career-track to become auxiliary nurse midwives
- Measures and targets: A variety of disease control measures and targets have been proposed to tackle challenges ranging from HIV-TB co-infection to trauma and screening for chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes and common cancers
- Control of indoor and outdoor air pollution has been accorded high priority with water, sanitation and nutrition
Conclusion
All of these augur well for moving the health agenda forward
However, the real challenges lie in:
- how quickly the government can strengthen the public sector
- how well it can regulate the partnering private sector
- how effectively it can ramp up the health workforce to reach all sections of the population
- how efficiently the Central and State governments can team up. Fingers crossed!
Economy
[1]. Bankruptcy board spells out ‘eligibility’
Context
Entities will have to form a separate subsidiary with dedicated resources related to insolvency
Backdrop
In an earlier order, IBBI rejected an application for registration as an Insolvency Professional (IP) by an individual who works with one of the so-called Big Four consultancy firms. “… an IP must not ‘engage in any employment’, repeat ‘any employment’. It envisages that a person must not play two roles — profession and employment — simultaneously,” according to the order
What has happened?
- The first order issued by the recently-established Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI) is expected to set in motion a chain of events at many firms, including well-known consultancies that are eyeing the huge market for stressed assets (Stressed assets = NPAs + Restructured loans + Written off assets ) and debt resolution
- IBBI is not going to grant registration to individuals in such a scenario (check backdrop above) and so entities that want to be registered will have to form a separate subsidiary with dedicated resources related to insolvency and bankruptcy work. Give the article a light read.
Indian Express
[1]. A half cure
Context
New National Health Policy checks some boxes but sidesteps basic concerns, leaves too much to the states on maintaining standards
The Positive
- Strong state interventionneeded to control the surge of diabetes, heart and respiratory diseases is recognized
- Establishing a professionally-managed state public healthcare cadre makes sense:
- A dedicated cadre of healthcare professionals can detect state-specific health hazards and contain them before they spread
- Multi-disciplinary approach:
- The inclusion of professionals from sociology, economics, anthropology, nursing, hospital management and communication is a recognition of a multi-disciplinary approach and an acknowledgment that cultural attitudes must be understood if public health strategies are to gain community acceptance
- Goal of pushing up male sterilization by 30 per cent and, if possible, much higher
- Putting male sterilisation upfront also exhibits concern for the plight of women, who, after dealing with unwanted pregnancies and repeated childbirths, also undergo harrowing tubectomies
- World: Thailand successfully made vasectomies into a routine affair more than 25 years ago
- India: Can incentivise (not coerce) men to limit family size by sterilisation
- Piggy-backing medical and paramedical education on service delivery
- Recognition that AYUSH needs to be integrated into the research, teaching and therapeutic components of health systems
- Stress on traditional systems need to back their claims with evidence is equally positive
The Negative
AYUSH:
- Unsuccessful strategy repeated:
- Appointment of contractual AYUSH doctors in primary health facilitiesAYUSH practitioners
Impact:
- They simply function as substitutes for allopathic doctors and don’t do much traditional medicine practice there
- That though fulfills manpower shortfalls but decreases the strength of AYUSH
- The Clinical Establishments Act 2010 receives minimal backing from State and rejected by Indian Medical Association: Leaves a hapless public at the receiving end of much care, malpractice and exorbitant treatment costs with no protection
- Unclear about generating resources
- The policy places enormous reliance on the eighth standard-pass female volunteer, ASHA — the lynchpin of the National Rural Health Mission
- The policy shows no recognition of the magnitude of what is happening on the ground, even when a WHO report shows that unqualified medical practitioners constitute more than half the “doctors” in India
Conclusion
- It is time that registration, accreditation and regulation of clinical establishments and standards is put in the Constitution’s concurrent list in much the same way as drugs, food and medical education
- Too much is at stake to be left to the states that often look the other way when it comes to maintaining critical health standards — this is something that ought to be non-negotiable
- The challenge now is to translate the policy’s stated noble intentions into schemes and programmes supported by the requisite financial backing
- It is accountability that needs early deliverance
Live Mint
[1]. Big Data firms are not immune to disruption
Context
Allegations of market abuse are being filed with competition authorities, including the Competition Commission of India
Rationale
Digital markets are subject to disruptive innovation, and that this limits the ability of large firms to exercise market power if they fail to innovate
Article is filled with jargon and is not much important from exam perspective.
You can read it for knowledge purposes.
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