JHABUA, India — Inside the drab district hospital, where dogs patter down the corridors, sniffing for food, Ratan Bhuria’s children are curled together in the malnutrition ward, hovering at the edge of starvation. His daughter, Nani, is 4 and weighs 20 pounds. His son, Jogdiya, is 2 and weighs only eight. Landless and illiterate, drowned by debt, Mr. Bhuria and his ailing children have staggered into the hospital ward after falling...
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Acute shortage of doctors, paramedics in rural areas by Kounteya Sinha
The shortage of doctors and paramedical staff for the country's poor and downtrodden is assuming alarming proportions. According to the latest data on rural health statistics, a huge number of posts sanctioned for medical staff in primary and community health centers have been lying vacant. Consider the case of primary health centres. The vacancies stack up to 5,224 doctors, 7,243 health care workers and 1701 health assistants, respectively. The situation...
More »The field's wide open by Rajdeep Sardesai
Mani Shankar Aiyar has probably not read Dale Carnegie's best-seller, How to Win Friends and Influence People. A few years ago, in a St Stephens alumni register, former External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh wrote, "I am what I am because of the college". Prompt came Aiyar's rejoinder: "Why blame the college!" Politics though is not a college campus. The ready wit and pungent sarcasm which might earn applause in a debating...
More »Global wheat production forecast to be lower than expected – UN
The United Nations Food and AgriculTure Organization (FAO) has cut its global wheat production forecast for 2010 due to the impact of poor weather on crops in recent weeks, but allayed fears of a new food crisis, noting that current stocks should be adequate. The global wheat production forecast is now expected to be 651 million tonnes, down from the 676 million tonnes reported in June, the Rome-based agency said in...
More »Can we have a classroom that does not have a class distinction? by Bageshree S
The 25 per cent quota in all schools envisaged by the RTE has created a big debate Do upper middle class people in a city believe that the quality of their child's education is compromised when they share classroom space with the children of construction labourers or domestic workers? This fundamental question is at the heart of the heated debate on a clause in the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act,...
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