Varun Hari Prasad

The whole country witnessed widespread outrage after the recent incidents of merciless assault on the dignity and modesty of women, especially on innocent young children. These dastardly acts shook our collective conscience as a nation. It also casts a dark shadow on our age old civilizational values and the progressiveness of our society. But most importantly, these incidents re-ignited the debate on how far we have moved as far as safety of our women and children are concerned. Lessons not learnt well These incidents show us that we have not learnt much from the watershed Nirbhaya case. The government did take some steps after the national outrage in December 2012 but there was no credible follow-up action due to which we are back to square one. The contributing factors To find solutions to this disease, we must first understand the cause of such a situation. We must never assume that a man commits such offence for pleasure. If we do so, we are living...

Consistent with its tradition of dazzling the people with numbers and slogans the government announced the ‘World’s Largest Government Funded Health Programme’, which the BJP Chief Amit Shah described as NAMO care. Indeed it turned out to be NAMO: No Allocation Messaging Only! The reality is that Ayushman Bharat Yojana is not the World’s largest government funded health scheme but the World’s largest unfunded government jumla. In the Budget 2016-17, the Finance Minister announced a National Health Scheme to cover 6 crore people with a coverage of ₹ 1 lakh but it did not see the light of the day. Now he has announced a scheme for 10 crore families with a coverage of upto ₹ 5 lakh. While the political messaging of this scheme is robust, the devil is in the detail. Many states in our country already have their own health insurance schemes (in many states the coverage is ₹ 1 lakh). The combined premium of the state schemes is ₹ 1 lakh crore per year. If the governmen...