Policy Wise

The Indian government is taking special steps to attract and retain women scientists. Nature reports,
Women scientists in India will soon be able to choose flexible working hours and even work from home if they have children below the age of three. Campus housing will be provided for women and all institutions will be required [...]

In a fine column in the Indian Express, Saubhik Chakravarti argues that respecting patent regimes does not necessarily sacrifice lives,
They should also see that the question of affordable access to drugs is a matter of public policy, not patents per se. India spends 1 per cent of its GDP on public health — that’s [...]

The Scientist has a wonderful article on the need for proper monitoring and evaluation of public health pro grammes. While billions have been invested in recent years in public health, outcome measurement remains poor. ”The evaluation gap” leads to a situation where there is little accounting of the moneys spent or the benefit of the [...]

Despite the most strenuous efforts,polio has become impossible to eradicate. Now in a more worrying trend, the latest outbreak in U.P is due to the P3 strain,
As a result, no fresh cases of P1 have been reported in the last one year. But the neglect of other polio viruses has led to an unprecedented outbreak [...]

The Economist has an article on the quacks practicing in Delhi,
Ten years ago Delhi’s state government drew up an “Anti-Quackery Bill” of which nothing more was heard. But the real problem is less the quacks themselves than the health-care vacuum in which they flourish. India’s private health business is booming, importing flashy technology to serve [...]

Kanpur Medical college is experimenting with distance education,
The students of GSVM Medical college could soon access all the important lectures of the expert professors of AIIMS and Chandigarh PGI in their own college, thanks to distance learning.With country’s medical colleges facing a shortage of teachers, the Central government is planning to connect them through distance [...]

In a hard-hitting article, Devesh Kapoor argues that the World Bank should stop bankrolling countries like India which consistently perform low on education and public health,

In India’s case, the state’s inability to discharge this most basic obligation to its citizens in education and health, even as it [...]

In an op-ed in Economic Times, Arvind Panagariya tells the story of Indian rural health crisis. He then provides some policy prescriptions,
This can be best accomplished by providing the poor cash transfers for out-patient care and insurance for in-patient care. Once this is done, a competitive price must be charged for services provided at [...]

Policy Wise has argued previously that ”it is the dynamics of competition whose benefits are likely to be far more relevant in assessing the overall net benefits of NANO”. Barely a month after the launch of Nano, TATA group has announced its support for a car which would run on compressed air with zero emissions.
The [...]

A new study by the World health organization warns that smoking could potentially kill one billion people in the 21st century. An article in The Economist details some of the challenges governments face in attempting to control smoking especially in the developing world,
The practical argument for action is simpler: the tobacco industry is getting the [...]