Public Sector

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The National Health Policy, 2017 can be credited for an alternative vision towards the development of the health sector in India, but it falls short of expectations on certain counts. The core idea of strategic purchasing from the private sector is relevant, but can be incompatible with the existence of a robust public sector, particularly when reforms for enhancing the competitiveness of the public sector are undermined. Thus, the NHP essentially reopens the fundamental debate regarding the role of social choice mechanisms while deciding upon policy instruments and desirable outcomes. This has profound implications for the political economy of the health sector and can unintentionally catapult health as a salient feature in electoral politics.

Unchanging India, and even the World Bank has now joined the troupe of excuse-mongers: India has been unable to reap the full advantages of liberalisation because of natural calamities that have befallen the country. Suppose some dull character were to ask whether the entire point of development was not to extricate the economy from the vicissitudes of nature, what answer would the mandarins, including the foreign ones, provide?

A review of the productivity performance of the National Textile Corporation in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry presents a disturbing picture of poor capacity utilisation, outdated technology and machinery, poor maintenance and excess humanpower. The situation calls for drastic restructuring to improve the economic viability of the Corporation

If disinvestment boils down to a network of arrangements which enables those close to the centre of power to make mindboggling profit on their money, while the rest of the species are condemned to a paltry profit, none amongst the latter will be agreeable to graze in the village common any more; about everyone who has the animal instinct implanted in him or her will try to cultivate the appropriate contacts.