At the intensive care unit of the state-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital in New Delhi, a two-year-old battered baby girl is fighting to survive. The doctors attending to her have waged a six-week battle to keep her alive, but they are quickly losing hope that she will ever live a normal life after the torture she endured at such a tender age. When she was first brought to...

‘Use of locally available food can go a long way in keeping children healthy' Going local on food consumption is the way to keep children healthy. This simple truth – based as much on traditional wisdom as it is on scientific principle – is the message of the committee set up to address child malnutrition in Karnataka, which has prescribed a “feeding protocol” for children of different age groups, pregnant women...

The alleged incident of two quarry workers in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district being forced to swallow faeces draws attention to larger issues. NORMALLY the villages and hamlets in and around Thiruvakkarai in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district are woken up by the loud noise and vibrations caused by the blasting of rocks and the pounding of boulders with sledge hammers, apart from the rattling sound of tipper lorries transporting stones from 40-odd...

Historians tell us of the colonial era stories of miserable conditions of workers, even bonded labour, in tea plantations of eastern India. However, the situation improved after independence. In the past few decades the tea industry has made steady profits even in worst years of economic downturn. And that is why reports of starvation deaths in tea plantations of Assam are so shocking. An Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) report says that...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...