Revisit sedition law: Romila Thapar

At a time when Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar has been booked under sedition, eminent historian Romila Thapar said on Wednesday that sedition was a colonial-era law meant to clamp down on people and should be reconsidered in a free nation.

The veteran scholar, who taught ancient history at JNU for decades, also said universities should sort out matters and that student outfits should refrain from impressing their political parties by playing up issues.

“We have inherited a vast number of colonial laws that were meant for a different society. Today, we are not a colony. These laws need to be reconsidered now,” Professor Thapar told students at Ramjas College here while delivering a lecture on secularism.

She expressed concern over the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaque at Dadri near Delhi, saying, “People in authority kept saying it was an accident. One does not expect this as a citizen.”

She underlined that secularism and nationalism were “inseparable,” while asserting that secularism did not mean religion had no place in society.

“Secularism does not deny religion’s presence. It separates institutions that have religious control and those which should not have it,” she said.

Keywords: JNU, sedition, Romila Thapar

Source: The Hindu, 18-02-2016

Who is an anti-national?

For both Rohith Vemula and Kanhaiya Kumar, nationalism was about the welfare of the Indian people over that of the Indian state. This political vision made them threats in the eyes of goonda nationalists

In the rest of the world, history repeats itself first as tragedy and second as farce. In 21st century India, history repeats itself first as farce, and second on prime time.

Can a bunch of hysterical TV anchors really fool a nation into believing that the brightest students of one of its best universities are “anti-nationals” and their thuggish persecutors, “nationalists”? Can India’s famed diversity — of intelligence levels, if nothing else — save it from falling for the tired old game of witch-hunting anti-nationals? Well, the ruling dispensation seems to be betting against it.

So we’ve heard Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national president Amit Shah say that the Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi is an anti-national. Why? Because he has been siding with the anti-national students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The political intent behind this accusation cannot be misread. But unfortunately for Mr. Shah, the idea of Mr. Gandhi as an anti-national is, at best, amusing; at worst, an affront to the imagination.

Already, according to the nationalist taxonomy of the Sangh Parivar, Adivasis in central India, Dalit students, Left intellectuals, human rights activists, a certain religious minority, anti-nuclear activists, beef eaters, non-haters of Pakistan, inter-religious couples, homosexuals, and labour activists are anti-nationals. If we take into account Monday’s episode of goonda nationalism at Patiala House in New Delhi, we must expand the list to include journalists, people dressed like JNU students, anyone without an identity card, anyone recording goonda nationalists in action, and anyone opposed to the said goonda nationalists.

At this rate, it seems likely that by the time the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) finishes its term, the vast majority of Indians — who are unfortunately still not members of the Sangh Parivar — would have turned into anti-nationals. The only cure for their anti-nationalism being the healing nationalist brutality of an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) or Bajrang Dal lynch mob, while India’s nationalist police presides over the ceremony, peacefully.

What exactly is goonda nationalism? A goonda nationalist is anyone who arrogates to himself the job of certifying citizens as anti-national. So if I walk up to you on the street, slap you, grab your collar, and brand you an anti-national, I would be a goonda nationalist.

The turn to goonda nationalism

Goonda nationalism is not a new phenomenon. The German historian Arthur Rosenberg, in his book,Fascism as a Mass Movement, refers to two conditions (among others) as prefiguring the rise of fascism: the rise of right-wing nationalism, and an active connivance between the state and identitarian storm troopers. What India has witnessed over the past month, first in Hyderabad Central University (HCU) and now in JNU, is early consolidation of these two conditions for the furtherance of an agenda that we shall not call fascist because, as we’ve been assured repeatedly by eminent Indian liberals, India is too diverse and Indian democracy too resilient for us to use the f-word.

Yet the pattern is too striking to miss. In HCU, the crisis was sparked off by a students’ association expressing sympathy for Yakub Memon, whose execution has been questioned by several legal luminaries. The HCU unit of the ABVP spearheaded the persecution of this student body by branding them as “anti-national”. Its case was taken up by a BJP member of Parliament (MP) Bandaru Dattatreya, who sent a complaint to the Centre. The outcome: a pliant vice-chancellor and a pliable police acted against the students targeted by the ABVP, and the story hit the national headlines with the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a vocal critic of the ABVP and its violent majoritarianism.

In JNU, the crisis was sparked by a group of students organising a protest meeting in support of Afzal Guru, whose execution has been questioned by several legal luminaries. The ABVP spearheaded the persecution of the students involved by branding them as “anti-national”. Its case was taken up by a BJP MP, Maheish Girri, whose complaint led to an FIR being lodged. The outcome: a pliant vice-chancellor and a pliable police acted against the students targeted by the ABVP, and the story hit the national headlines with the arrest of JNU students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar, a vocal critic of the ABVP and its violent majoritarianism.

The stick used to beat the students in both cases was nationalism — and not just any nationalism but one specifically of the right-wing kind, by which we mean one that is directed against a section of the country’ own citizens whose nationalism is deemed suspect. The stick is wielded, as Rosenberg noted, by the state giving free rein to identitarian storm troopers — in this case, the ABVP.

In the past, the marauding storm troopers have belonged to one or other of the mutant spawn of the hydra-headed Sangh Parivar — the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, etc. Sadly, India’s liberal intelligentsia — and what’s called the Left in India is liberal and not left-wing in its politics — has been content to engage in a politics of exposure, trying to shame the perpetrators of repressive violence on the grounds, most famously, of intolerance.

It is therefore worth noting that the crackdown on dissent in the JNU campus, as well as the attack on journalists at Patiala House, comes after much public shaming of the NDA’s unwillingness to uphold the virtue of tolerance. It is as if the months of liberal backlash over intolerance has had zero impact on the NDA. Or perhaps it felt encouraged by the whole “award wapsi” phenomenon. Now that the awards have been returned, petitions have been signed, protests have been marched, and editorials written on the virtues of tolerance, what else can liberal pluralistic India throw at the ruthless advance of a divisive, monocultural nationalism?

Let down by the liberals

India’s bane has been the failure of its self-proclaimed ‘constitutional’ liberals to acknowledge that the forces of Hindutva and economic liberalism (or neo-liberalism) are a package deal. It is this failure that leads them to time and again frame such violence simply as attacks on free speech, while remaining blind to their own complicity in the political economy of repression.

In their heated embrace of economic liberalism, India’s liberal elites looked away as the state either went after or neglected the interests of labourers, the urban poor, the farmers, the landless, the land-poor — the vast majority of whom are from socially marginalised castes. Now they find the state looking away as their own liberal freedoms come under siege by state-endorsed illiberal forces.

Incidentally, both HCU’s Rohith Vemula and JNU’s Kanhaiya Kumar had the clarity of vision to see through such self-serving liberal delusions. Vemula tried to unite the twin minorities of Dalits and Muslims on the HCU campus. Mr. Kumar’s agenda was to unite the student community and informalised labour against the divisive politics of the ABVP inside JNU and neo-liberal economic policies outside. It was this acuity of political vision — owed in no small measure to their underprivileged origins — that made them such threats in the eyes of goonda nationalists.

Cops prowling around a university campus is a terrible cliché — one that’s been enacted hundreds of times in the brief history of the nation state. So is the use of ultra-nationalism to substitute the interests of a repressive state apparatus for the interests of the people it represses. Put another way, is nationalism about the welfare of the Indian people or that of the Indian state, which anyway seems beholden to foreign capital rather than Indian labour?

A more pressing question in the present context being: who has the right to label anyone as anti-national? And how should the average Indian citizen respond to the charge of being an anti-national?

The battle is already lost if one seeks to answer the charge by trying to prove that one is not an anti-national. The correct response, as Mr. Kumar showed in a brilliant speech that went viral on social media, is to go on the offensive, and ask what qualifies goonda nationalists to issue certificates of nationalism, and to question the motives of a government that allows them to do so.

sampath.g@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: Jawaharlal Nehru University, ABVP, JNU

Source: The Hindu, 18-02-2016

Humanity’s race against itself

Humanity

is engaged in a highstakes race with its own growth: lest our use of energy and materials get out of control, we must constantly innovate to become more efficient. Unfortunately, new research suggests we may be losing.

The rapid advancement of electronics technology illustrates how the race works. The number of transistors in the world’s devices has gone from one in 1947 to a thousand billion billion today—more than there are letters in all the written text produced in human history. The proliferation hasn’t inundated the planet because the amount of physical material and energy used in each transistor has shrunk spectacularly, reflecting a relentless advance—seen in almost all technologies—that gets economists and tech enthusiasts excited about the possibilities for a cleaner and more environmentally friendly future.

The hope is that by doing more with less, we can keep growing without bumping up against physical limits— an optimistic vision sometimes called “decoupling”. But is there any evidence for it? That’s less clear.

Long ago, the economist William Jevons noted that improvements in energy efficiency, by reducing prices, often induce people to use still more energy. For decoupling to work, efficiency gains in energy or material must outpace this “rebound effect”, as well as other factors such as overall growth in production and population. Despite all the progress humanity has made, a new parsing of the empirical data suggests that’s not happening.

Two engineers, Christopher Magee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tessaleno Devezas of the University of Beira Interior in Portugal, looked at two sets of data covering 116 different technologies existing between 1940 and 2010, ranging from the chemical industry and electronics to metals, wood and energy. Almost every technology over this period shows exponential improvement (though at different rates) in prices, performance and efficiency of energy and material use. Over the 20 years up to 2009, for example, the price of photovoltaics consistently dropped about 10% per year.

The improvements weren’t enough, though, to outpace the combination of population growth, economic expansion and the rebound effect. As a result, overall material use tended to increase: those photovoltaics, for example, consumed about 13% more materials each year.

To be sure, the data are far from perfect. Information on many of the 116 technologies exists over intervals of only one or two decades. Still, the fact that none of the data fit the usual story of decoupling suggests that the concept is at the very least highly questionable.

The only six exceptions were technologies for producing substances such as asbestos, mercury and thallium—all toxic materials that were ultimately controlled by policy intervention and legal restriction.

The results don’t imply that humans won’t ever achieve decoupling. They simply suggest that the historical record so far isn’t encouraging, and that there’s no reason to expect it to happen on its own.

Magee and Devezas, for their part, remain optimistic. We might still find a solution, they told me, if we can manage to eschew politically motivated arguments and predetermined conclusions in favour of more good science and especially empirical work. The more we recognize the burden that ever-increasing materials use puts on the planet, the more we might be able to encourage forces of many kinds—market, government or spontaneous social movements—to counter the trend.

Source: 17 Feb 2016 mint ePaper

See the big picture

Get your heads out of those subject-specific cubbyholes and look around you for a broader vision.

If you go far back enough into the history of any discipline, you’ll come to a point where it merges in a vague way with other disciplines, where it seems to have existed as an idea in more than one space before breaking out into its own. The new discipline is born out of a gap or an overlap between two older ones, addressing questions or problems that either of the older ones could not. In the initial phases of this new discipline or field, there’s a lot of exchange of ideas across different areas. People come in and go out of it, bringing their perspectives and enriching the new area. But as this new field grows, it develops rules and procedures of its own, building walls that separate it from other fields, even those it originally grew out of.

Interdisciplinary approach
Most modern education systems encourage us to think within these disciplinary boundaries, at least for a large part of our schooling and early college. Very few programmes give us the space to explore the fuzzy spaces between disciplines, or to approach a problem from a variety of perspectives. It takes us a long time, often only when we get to a research degree — or in some cases, the rare postgraduate degree — to be exposed to interdisciplinary approaches. Of course there are the token “theme-based” projects in school that attempt to bring different subjects together under the umbrella of a topic. But more often than not, these end up showing us a variety of ways to look at the same thing rather than trying to explore a synthesis or a combination of perspectives — which is what interdisciplinarity is all about.

But what does an interdisciplinary way of thinking has to do with day to day life? Of what use is it outside research labs and higher academics?

In truth, the way we do things outside academics is essentially interdisciplinary. We mix up various bodies of knowledge to carry out the tasks of daily living, but we do it subconsciously, our focus being the task and its completion. Our basic understanding of physics, chemistry and biology is brought into how we deal with materials in the kitchen while what we know about human behaviour and economics is applied to bargaining in the market. Of course, we might argue that this is nothing but common sense… but isn’t common sense, at its core, the application of a wide range of knowledge to practical situations?

Interdisciplinary thinking is just a little more complex than this. It can work both at the level of defining the problem — the way in which we understand it — and at the level of finding solutions to it. Sometimes the process of understanding the problem or the situation will itself suggest a way of solving it. The more complex a problem is, the more likely it is that the solution will need an interdisciplinary approach. That’s why you will find people from many different fields working together on large issues such as climate change, public health, international peace keeping attempts, or urban planning. It’s true that these issues also need a deep understanding in a specific discipline, but the key to the solution lies in combining expertise from many fields, and this is where an interdisciplinary mindset becomes crucial.

So the specialists who work on these issues also have a sense of the limits of their own fields and the possibilities of other fields. It’s like a having a telescopic view — you pull back sufficiently to see how different ways of thinking fit together to help form a complete picture. This is different from deep disciplinary learning, which gives you a microscopic view, with more and more clarity about details.

An interdisciplinary mindset is also about openness. It’s about not getting locked into one way of thinking or doing, and being able to draw from different, often unusual, areas to address a situation.

To address today’s big problems — disease, homelessness, depleting resources, environmental degradation, violence and social unrest — we need different ways of thinking. We need to stay connected to the wide range of subjects that we are exposed to in school, at least in some minimal ways, so that we stay aware of these possibilities of understanding the world in different ways.

An art historian has a lot to learn from materials science (the composition and history of differencat compounds used in creating art work, where they were used and how), while someone who studies the spread of disease in cities needs to understand the culture and social structure of the communities who are affected by the disease.

What this means is that we need to keep reading outside our narrow disciplines. Once in a while, we need to pick up a book of contemporary non-fiction that has nothing to do with what we are studying. Of course, we can’t stay on top of everything, given the way information is growing. But we can stay informed about the kinds of problems we are interested in solving, and reading a wide range of books and articles about these problems.

With the Internet, it is no longer difficult to do this. All it takes is to get our heads out of those subject-specific cubbyholes and look around us, to sometimes use a telescope rather than a microscope.

The author teaches at the University of Hyderabad and edits Teacher Plus. Email: usha.bpgll@gmail.com

Keywords: interdisciplinarity, education system, multidisciplinary study, disciplinary boundaries, interdisciplinary approach

Source: The Hindu, 17-02-2016

JNU, and the idea of India

The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) imbroglio has produced two important issues for public discussion. The first focuses on the limits that sedition (patriotism?) places on freedom of speech. It asks, for example, whether shouting anti-India slogans, by unknown persons as the First Information Report says, constitutes a ground for booking the students’ union president under sedition laws. If fine distinctions were to be made between slogans, protests, speeches, dissent, and incitement, and further between fuzzy and definite consequences of such actions, would not only some (very few) free speech expressions be considered seditious? These are crucial issues for our constitutional democracy today, and the JNU case has presented our courts with a great opportunity to give us a doctrine on the limits to free speech in India. Will we see in the court’s judgment its finest hour, as when, in the Kesavananda Bharati case, it set out the Basic Structure doctrine which places limits on the amending power of Parliament, or will it be its darkest hour, as in theHabeas Corpus case where unrestricted powers of detention under the Emergency were permitted? Will Justice H.R. Khanna be the court’s guide, or will it be Justice P.N. Bhagwati?

The second issue, entangled in the first, is with respect to the place of JNU in the postcolonial nation’s public life as the university nears its 50th year. I belong to the first decade of JNU, a magical period during which we gained perspective and learned the power of ideas and of democratic deliberation. It was a time when we became passionate about causes and when no tyranny was fearful enough to suppress our dissent. It covered the period of the Emergency and of the years immediately after, when a traumatised nation delved deep into its inner resources to discover what it stood for and what it stood against. It was a time for serious reflection.

Campus life in the heady 1970s

The 1970s was a period of ferment both globally and in India. The students’ movement was shaking up the Western world as was the peace movement and the challenges to orthodoxy in the form of music, fashion, poetry, and films. Demands for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) were being made. ‘Make love, not war’ was the slogan of the young who wanted to be unshackled from social conservatism. At this time the women’s movement was being seeded in JNU, as were many non-party political formations. The Emergency was on and JNU students had been picked up, including the students’ union president, and were languishing in jail. Yet the university was a magnet for students from across the country, from different backgrounds, and from different disciplines. Students who had graduated in the natural and applied sciences were flocking to the social sciences to understand what was happening to the nation.

In this turmoil JNU was able to give its education a national character by the points system it had developed, and by the examinations held across the country, to produce a level playing field. Students from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and regions, would be compensated for their disadvantage and thereby could face the competition. Soon after my joining in 1976, I recall taking out morchas to the surrounding areas shouting ‘Tanashahi nahi chalegi, nahi chalegi (down with despotism)’, and then rushing back into the sanctuary of JNU before the police came. The Emergency was on. We shouted slogans against the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) in the Mavalankar auditorium. We debated the articles of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) constitution on the lawns of the Gandhi Peace Foundation. We deliberated on an Agenda for India at the India International Centre. We collected funds for national tragedies such as the supercyclone in Orissa (now Odisha) and the Yamuna floods in Delhi.

But India alone was not our theatre of politics. The world was. Looking back I find it funny that we had to face the lathis of Delhi Police for protesting against the regime of the Shah of Iran or the sell-out of Palestinian interests by the Camp David accords. We campaigned for India to send foodgrain to Cambodia (then Kampuchea) which was just emerging from the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot. In these heady days of politics we also saw art films from across the world and learnt to perform street plays. We were the earliest supporters of the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music And Culture Amongst Youth (SPIC MACAY). In JNU we discovered voice and what it meant to stand up against tyranny. We became political.

Steady stream of who’s who

But this article is not about nostalgia. It is about the public legacy of this great university. It is about the place of JNU in the national imagination. JNU gave the students who entered it many things. It gave them opportunity. If we were to do a roll call of bureaucrats, journalists, artists, translators, writers, activists, professors, vice chancellors, heads of important institutions, and politicians, JNU would have a fair share of the leading members of these groups. It is not for nothing that in the last two years the heads of the Intelligence Bureau, Research and Analysis Wing, Central Bureau of Investigation, and the Foreign and Cabinet Secretaries have been from JNU. They do not look like anti-nationals to me. So where does all this ‘anti-national university’ stuff come from? What I have presented are the facts. Will those who have benefited from JNU please speak up in its defence?

Ask any of them what JNU gave them, and they will tell you it broadened their perspective, introduced them to ideas, even dissenting ones, prepared them for competition, gave them self-confidence, and fired them up with the making of a just India. It made them realise that dissent could be a virtue. In addition, JNU gave them networks. Anyone who understands success will know that networks are as important for success as merit and scholarship. That is why the Ivy League universities in the U.S., and Oxbridge in the U.K., and the Indian Institutes of Management and Indian Institutes of Technology in India have the reach they enjoy within state and society.

Crucible of the alternative

In addition to opportunity, self-confidence, personality development, and networks, JNU also gave a student perspective about the nature of the world, not just in terms of the global order, but also in terms of the structures of power, dynamics of society, drivers of change, and aspirations of citizens. We learnt how peasants became citizens. We learnt how elite capture was a problem for democracy. These ideas enriched our public discourse. At JNU we produced and reproduced the idea of an India that was inclusive, anti-discriminatory, gender-just, environmentally sustainable, artistically creative, cosmopolitan and socially redistributive.

There were many things wrong with JNU. For example, the liberal persuasion was not allowed the space it should have been given by the Stalinist Left. The political spectrum was wide but it could have been wider. Analytical thinking was feeble, and ideological camps gave protection to the less capable. But it was possible to question these ideological hegemonies. To dissent, experiment, collaborate, this is the signature of JNU. Debate was polemical but it was peaceful. There was no violence. By providing personnel to the civil services, academic institutions, civil society organisations, and media, JNU has been a significant incubator for the task of nation-building.

In addition to being an incubator of personnel to the state and civil society, JNU has also been an incubator of dissenting ideas. For a nation to cope with the pressures of modernity and the challenges of globalisation it needs to have an army of intellectuals who can prepare the nation for this new world that is upon us. It needs to engage with these new ideas. Go to a seminar in JNU, and you will be delighted by the intensity of the questions and the earnestness of the search for answers. It is one of the few places in the country where interdisciplinarity is a habit and where conversations between aestheticians and political scientists do not raise an eyebrow. Nor do dialogues between the cosmologies of the East and of the West.

A cosmopolitan university is a precious resource, for it continuously feeds the public sphere with questions and answers, with challenges to accepted truths and alternative readings of canonical texts. This is under threat today. Censorship of ideas and social relationships is being demanded by outsiders to the idea of JNU. Incidentally, the University of Chicago has issued the following statement on freedom of speech: “It is not the proper role of the university to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable and even deeply offensive… Concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as justification for closing off discussion about ideas, however offensive.” This represents the idea of JNU. Let us protect it from the hecklers who are knocking at the door.

(Peter Ronald deSouza is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. He holds the Dr. S. Radhakrishnan Chair of the Rajya Sabha for 2015-2017. Views are personal.)

Keywords: Jawaharlal Nehru University, JNU, ABVP

Source: The Hindu, 17-02-2016

Thinker and the Thought

J KRISHNAMURTI





In all our experiences, there is always the experiencer, the observer, who is gathering to himself more and more or denying himself. Is that not a wrong process? We can wipe it out completely and put it aside only when I experience, not as a thinker experiences, but when I am aware of the false process and see the state in which the thinker is the thought.So long as I am experiencing, becoming, there must be this dualistic action, the thinker and the thought, two separate processes at work; there is no integration, there is always a centre that is operating through the will of action to be or not to be -collectively, individually , nationally and so on.
So long as effort is divided into the experiencer and the experience, there must be deterioration. Integration is when the thinker is no longer the observer and there are no two different states. Our effort is to bridge the two.
The will of action is always dualistic. How to go beyond this will that is separative and discover a state in which dualistic action is not? That can only be found when we directly experience when the thinker is the thought. The effort of the thinker is to become more or become less; and therefore, in that struggle, in that action of the will, in `becoming', there is always the deteriorating factor; we are pursuing a false process and not a true process.... If I realise that I am greedy , that there is not the observer who is greedy but I am myself greed, our whole response to it is entirely different; then our effort is not destructive....

Health Is Wealth





A redesigned national health insurance policy promises to improve India's social safety net

Indian governments have an abysmal record in providing healthcare. Among major economies, India has perhaps the most vulnerable population when it comes to dealing with health emergencies. Around 58% of total healthcare expenditure is borne by patients directly, without insurance or reimbursements. Since 2008, central governments have tried to address the problem through a cashless national health insurance scheme, RSBY, for economically vulnerable people. In a welcome move, health ministry plans improvements here by bundling RSBY with a few other schemes, and enhancing the extent of insurance cover. A well designed health insurance scheme is a key component of a social safety net.Some states have taken upon themselves the responsibility of providing health insurance. But given the growing extent of labour mobility in India, there is a strong need for a national portable health insurance policy such as RSBY.
RSBY, a centrally sponsored scheme where the Centre and states jointly pay the insurance premium, has had a mixed record. According to the government, only about 37 million families of the target group of 73 million have been covered by the scheme. Moreover, only 19 states have signed up to partner the Centre to fund RSBY. It's critical, therefore, to use the experience of the last few years to improve the scheme.
There are two important points which should serve as guideposts for the new national health insurance plan. Existing plans cover hospitalisation, while a significant proportion of out of pocket expenses are on out-patient treatments and medicines. A redesign which seeks to cover these areas will provide benefits to everybody .For patients, it will ease the pressure of healthcare expenses. This will also help government as there is evidence to suggest that the insured opt for costlier hospitalisation in the absence of out-patient cover.Another key factor in the redesign should be inherent flexibility which will allow a national policy to dovetail existing state policies.
A national health insurance policy has not been an expensive proposition. The Centre has spent Rs 4,853 crore in the last four years, which is around what it is reportedly willing to spend in a single year under the redesigned health insurance policy . In all likelihood, economies of scale will make a national insurance policy less expensive than initial estimates. The forthcoming budget should outline the contours of this policy as it is a critical component of India's health.
Source: Times of India, 17-02-2016