Tobacco is a silent killer and the single largest cause of preventable disease including cancer, heart attacks, chronic obstructive lung disease and asthma. According to World Health Organisation, tobacco killed 100 million people in the 20th Century and will kill a billion people (ten times more) in the 21st. Deaths due to tobacco in India are expected to rise from 1.4 per cent in 1990 to 13.3 per cent in 2020....

Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad called for a "jihad" against tobacco use after a report released on Tuesday identified India as the world's second largest consumer of tobacco. An estimated 274.9 million Indians consume tobacco, the first Global Adult Tobacco Survey said. Nearly 0.9 million tobacco-related deaths occur in India annually as compared to 5.5 million world wide. India is also the world's third largest producer of tobacco, the report added. "A...

India’s leading agricultural scientist, an architect of the green revolution who has no ideological opposition to the genetic engineering of plants, contributed to the moratorium imposed on genetically modified brinjal today. Environment minister Jairam Ramesh, who announced the moratorium on the cultivation of a brinjal variety engineered to kill insect pests, said he had several discussions with agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan before his decision. Swaminathan had advised Ramesh to assess the...

Are the world and human society in general ready and willing to take action on critical issues that require a major change in the manner in which we produce and consume goods and services?  The science of climate change is now well established. This is the result of painstaking work of over two decades carried out by thousands of scientists drawn from across the globe to assess every aspect of...

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....