Keep up-to-date with all that is happening in welfare policy with this curated selection of news, published every fortnight. 

Policy News 

General:

Union Budget: 

• Parliament’s Budget session will be in two phases, beginning 31st January and ending on 3rd April. The Union Budget for FY 2020-2021 will be presented on 1 February 2020. This will be Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s second Budget. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Finance Minister have been holding a series of pre-Budget consultations. The government has also invited ideas and suggestions from citizens, with the last date of submission being 20 January 2020. 

Education:

• Discussions are underway to consider the feasibility of providing higher education courses in 22 regional languages since English  currently dominates the medium of instruction. The tweak will be made to the new National Education Policy, which is currently being drafted. 

Health and Nutrition: 

• A policy document which will facilitate the sale of subsidised protein rich vegetarian and non-vegetarian food through the Public Distribution System (PDS) is being devised by NITI Aayog. This will be a part of NITI Aayog’s 15-year vision document, to be placed in public later this month.
• The Union Cabinet has given its ex-post-facto approval on the Memorandum of Cooperation between the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This has been done in order to strengthen the healthcare system. Through this MoC, key maternal and child health and nutrition outcomes and services are being targeted. 

Infrastructure: 

• The National Infrastructure Pipeline Report has been launched by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Projects worth Rs. 102 lakh crore have been identified after conducting 70 stakeholder consultations in four months. Another 3 lakh crore projects are in the pipeline. According to the FM, this will facilitate in making India a USD 5 trillion economy by 2025. 

Opinion

“In the face of increased resistance [on the matter of the Citizenship Amendment Act], it is likely that the BJP will harden its ideological stance and deepen its centralising instincts in the fiscal and administrative arena, leaving states with little room for manoeuvre,” writes Yamini Aiyar, Founder of Accountability Initiative and the President, CEO of the Centre for Policy Research. Read here.