Vol. 4 No. 4 (Jul-Aug) (2023): Indian Public Policy Review

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a recognised global threat to health security. However, mainstreaming responses to this threat into public policy has remained elusive, and anti-AMR measures have been limited to health interventions. AMR is caused by global factors, including sustained and irresponsible antibiotic use in humans and animals, as well as climate change. Hence its effective management also requires global collaborative efforts. This policy brief provides an overview of AMR, its significance, and the current landscape of policies, national action plans, and funding for AMR research and surveillance within the G20 countries. It also highlights the need for concerted action and international cooperation to address this critical issue.

This paper delves into the structure of the healthcare market in India, contending the existence of three distinct markets: the government monopsony market, the institutional market, and the retail market. Each of these markets has unique characteristics in terms of healthcare service provisioning, pricing, and accessibility. We underscore systemic failures resulting from a lack of clarity about the structure of these markets, including disparities in service provision, lack of awareness about available services, and skewed incentives favouring private sector provisioning. We suggest unification of India's disparate healthcare markets, advocating for a more prominent role for the government. The proposed unification is a modification of the school voucher program, aimed at ensuring competitiveness on the supply side, and thereby improving service quality. While acknowledging the challenges of scale and state capacity, we argue that the proposal is worthy of further discussion and research, given its potential to harness the government's purchasing power to improve accessibility, affordability, and promote a competitive landscape that encourages innovation and quality in healthcare services.

As the world becomes more economically integrated, a complex web of asymmetric interdependences has emerged, allowing some states to wield disproportionate economic power. Consequently, recourse to economic coercion as a tool for compellence, deterrence, or co-optation has become much more frequent in current times. Debates around dependence-induced strategic and critical vulnerabilities have thus gained traction with an end objective to reduce or mitigate them. But a lack of conceptual framework underpinning the ideas of dependence, vulnerabilities, and strategic and critical vulnerabilities plagues the present decision-making apparatus, which runs the risk of treating subjects under each of these categories as synonymous. To prevent a one-size-fits-all approach emanating from the lack of conceptual differentiation, this paper presents a framework, in the form of a series of tests, to understand whether trade in a certain commodity between countries can be classified as a critical vulnerability.

The decision and the conviction to keep the capital markets functioning amidst the uncertainty of COVID-19 lockdown, proved to be a game changer for the Indian economy. The robust systems put in place over decades and reinforced with measures to strengthen systemic integrity during COVID, revived the inherent trust in the Indian markets, especially at the retail level. The buoyant numbers of new trading and demat accounts opened, new investors in Mutual Funds etc. are a reflection of this trust. At a structural level, apart from decreasing dependence on FPI investments, the retail segment has witnessed a secular shift from savings to investment. Additionally, within investments, there is a shift from fixed income to equities. This deepening of the investor base has moved the Indian capital market to a higher orbit igniting a structural shift in the economy. 

This review essay considers contemporary issues in ‘astropolitics’, the geopolitics of outer space. It does so in the context of Tim Marshall’s 2023 book, The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World. After enjoying considerable success with his books on Earth-bound geopolitics, Marshall turns his attention to outer space and once again finds the politics between states playing out, albeit amid a radically different and hostile geography beyond the planet’s atmosphere. The Future of Geography serves as a first-rate primer on astropolitics. However, the book’s accessibility comes at a cost, with some important subjects only receiving superficial treatment.