The Global Hunger Index report paints a gloomy picture of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. WITH the deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals just five years away, the 2010 Global Hunger Index report prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) paints a gloomy picture of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Some 29 countries in these regions, it says, have levels of hunger that are alarming or extremely alarming....

Special healthcare awaits children of Jharkhand. Under National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), a check-up drive for students of state-run government schools will be launched from Thursday with the hope of reaching out to about 45 lakh children aged between five and 10. According to Aradhana Patnaik, state director, NRHM, the children will be issued health cards giving them access to regular check-ups every six months and free medical treatment depending on their...

As the country grapples with a “mixed burden” of diseases that beset the developing as well as developed countries, Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on Monday said adequate research was needed to deal with the challenge of non-communicable and re-emerging diseases. Addressing the centenary celebrations of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) here, Mr. Azad said as the country moved from a developing nation to the...

Healthcare in Assam will no longer remain confined to hospitals and dispensaries. Come January, Dispur will take healthcare to the doorsteps of people living in villages and remote parts of the state. Assam health and family welfare minister Himanta Biswa Sarma today announced that an ambitious scheme, on the lines of the raijor padulit raijor sarkar (people’s government at people’s doorstep) would be launched in January 2011 to make healthcare accessible to...

Back in May 2010, sixty Dalits, who had worked their entire lives as manual scavengers, burned the baskets they used for collecting human excreta outside the District Collector's office here. They had just been employed as sweepers by the local administration under a rehabilitation scheme. Five months later, all of them are without work, having been suspended, astonishingly, for not working hard enough. “It took us a lot of courage to...