Pitches for cutting subsidies on oil, fertilizers

Shrugging off the air of despondency over the gloomy state of the economy, the Economic Survey 2012-13 on Wednesday suggested a slew of hard, but good decisions to stick to the path of fiscal consolidation to rescue the economy out of the current morass. While disfavouring higher tax rates on the rich, even in the wake of the “danger” of missing fiscal targets for the current year, the Survey, tabled in Parliament by Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, pitched for cutting subsidies on oil and fertilizers, especially urea, and called for widening the tax base.

Survey says economy to revive from difficult times this year

A year after India's economic growth is headed to a record ten-year low growth of 5% in 2012-13, economic advisers in the Finance Ministry expect the economy to recover to 6.1 - 6.7% in 2013-14. The Economic Survey, 2012-13, presented today gave a wide range of 0.6 percentage points for its projections for economic growth next fiscal as it recognised that forecasting at potential turning points is difficult.

At least 10-12 children per 10,000 population will develop cancer in India annually. Out of 60,000 children afflicted with this disease, only one out of 10 receives complete therapy. According to researchers with the new Lancet Oncology series published on Tuesday, the burden is likely to increase if cases are not detected early.

Even as the new series has sent messages to various governments to develop strategies for childhood cancer, for the first time the National Centre for Disease Informatics and Research in Bangalore will come out with a report on the incidence of different types of childhood cancers in India. Dr A Nandakumar, director in charge of the centre, said that leukaemias, lymphomas and retinoblastomas are very common in India.