AK Srivastava (SriAKS)

SUPREME COURT PULLS-UP HEALTH INSURERS for REFUSING POLICY RENEWAL INSURANCE companies can no longer refuse to renew a health insurance policy on the grounds that insured's claims ratio (the ratio of claims to premium paid) is too high. The Supreme Court has issued an order requiring insurance companies to continue providing cover even in cases where the insured contracts an ailment that requires treatment in subsequent years. Terming the discontinuation of cover by insurance companies arbitrary, illegal and unconstitutional a bench of justices S B Sinha and V S Sirpurkar asked the regulator to frame guidelines to ensure that insurance companies, both public sector and private, do not deny medical insurance facility to the public. The insurance companies had appealed before the apex court judgements in three cases where they had refused to provide cover on the ground that the insured persons were suffering from pre-existing diseases. In one instance, an insured who held and renewed...

कथनी और करनी में भीषण विरोधाभास, For a government keen on aggressively pushing the frontiers of reservation — even urging the private sector to consider affirmative action — the number of OBC, SC and ST category officials serving on the personal staff of ministers is minuscule, an RTI inquiry has revealed। While it would be unfair to suggest that caste considerations alone ought to matter in such appointments — it could even be argued that ministers from underprivileged backgrounds have shown a lack of bias — the profiles of staffers say a lot about how quota winds have bypassed ministerial offices। The RTI inquiry filed by Dev Ashish Bhattacharya has shown that there are no OBC officials serving as private secretaries — posts to which incumbents are handpicked. In one case, that of the rural development ministry, where the officer belongs to a scheduled tribe, the ministry’s response was coy, stating that service details were unavailable. At the level of private secretaries, there are...