Sixty per cent of hospitals in rural Maharashtra don’t have an obstetrician or gynaecologist, 85 per cent are not equipped to conduct caesarean sections and about 90 per cent don’t have blood storage facilities. These are just some of the several shocking findings of the third District Level Household Survey (DLHS), a health survey commissioned by the Union Health Ministry and conducted by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai....

Madvi Madka owns 4ha of land in Chingavaram in the Sukum block in central India. The district in which the block is located has become infamous after 6 April, killing of 76 policemen by the Maoists. This is the ground zero of the war between the Indian state and the Maoists, and Madka, who owns 4ha of land—often left fallow because there wasn’t enough water for irrigation—here used to make...

Nearly 2 lakh farmers committed suicide in India since 1997. The share of big five states accounted for 1,22,823 suicides in this 12 year period. The data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau points out that 16,196 farmers in India ended their life in 2008. K Nagaraj, an economist, in his report Farmers' suicides in India: Magnitude, Trends and Spatial Patterns, says, "The title to land was taken as the...

KEY TRENDS    • The 2019 India TB report says that the country accounted for a quarter of the global tuberculosis (TB) burden with an estimated 27 lakh cases in 2018. In 2018, the country was able to achieve a total notification of 21.5 lakh TB cases, of which 25 percent was from private sector. Majority of the TB burden is among the working age group. Nearly 89 percent of TB cases came from the age group 15-69 years....