Feature Article

Rajaie Batniji and Eran Bendavid dispute recent suggestions that health aid to developing countries leads to a displacement of government spending and instead argue that current evidence about aid displacement cannot be used to guide policy.

We condemn the attack by the Maoists on 21 April near Kerlapal village in Sukma district (in Chhattisgarh) in which they killed two security guards and abducted the Sukma district collector, Alex Paul Menon. At the time of this attack, Menon, accompanied by security guards, was in the process of conducting Gram Swaraj Abhiyaan across the district. (Letters)

It is a methodological flaw to conclude from data which shows a rise in the incidence of out-of-pocket medical expenses that the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana is ineffective. A response to Sakthivel Selvaraj, Anup K Karan, “Why Publicly- Financed Health Insurance Schemes Are Ineffective in Providing Financial Risk Protection” (EPW, 17 March 2012).

Survey data collected in 2007 from three districts in Andhra Pradesh, this article assesses the performance of 72 primary agricultural credit cooperatives. It finds that these credit cooperatives tend to be used as political instruments and, as a result, borrowers prioritise all debt obligations to microfinance institutions, informal moneylenders and others, before primary agricultural credit cooperatives. The authors suggest that if the performance of these credit cooperatives does not improve, a larger government role in the supply of credit may undermine the culture of repayment.

Given that the controversy over success and failure of Bt technology still exists, this paper discusses the available field studies that have addressed agro-economic questions of Bt cotton cultivation in India. Since a meta-analysis of studies can give only partial conclusions, owing to differences across study methodologies and coverage, this paper takes a different strategy, i e, looking not simply at differences between Bt farms and non-Bt farms, but at the experience of farmers before growing Bt and after switching to Bt.

The enormity of pollution due to pharmaceuticals in India has caught the attention of researchers all over the world. This was due to the near extinction of vultures in the Indian subcontinent in the 1990s caused by diclofenac and a recent study in 2007 by Swedish scientists on pharmaceutical effluents in Patancheru in Hyderabad. The massive outsourcing of pharmaceutical production by the west has made third world nations like India a victim of unbridled opportunism.