India will take at least 17 more years before it can reach the World Health Organization's ( WHO) recommended norm of one doctor per 1,000 people. The Planning Commission's high-level expert group (HLEG) on universal health coverage (UHC) - headed by Dr K Srinath Reddy - has predicted the availability of one allopathic doctor per 1,000 people by 2028. It has suggested setting up 187 medical colleges in 17 high focus...

When the boulders started raining down, the toil for survival turned into a trek for staying alive. At least a thousand labourers, many of them from Bengal, fled the site of the 1,200MW Teesta Stage-III hydel power project in Chungthang, North Sikkim, after seeing several fellow workers crushed by hurtling rocks. Last Sunday’s 6.9-magnitude quake, which has claimed over a 100 lives, didn’t just leave a trail of death; it snapped livelihoods...

Nine villages with a combined population of 1,000 were out of the reach of the rescue effort in North Sikkim till this evening, injecting a fresh sense of urgency into a task force blasting past and working around boulders blocking roads in the region. The cut-off villages are located in Dzongu, the protected area of the Lepchas, the indigenous tribal community of Sikkim. The villages have been identified as Shipgyer, Bey,...

An Army aerial survey on Wednesday showed that at least five villages in north Sikkim have been obliterated. More disturbingly, the survey failed to detect any people in or around the area, raising fears of the quake toll going up significantly. Authorities also said that 11 bodies were retrieved from the rubble at the hydel project near here where rescue teams fear that 40 workers are trapped in a flooded tunnel....

Sunday’s 6.8 magnitude earthquake on the Sikkim-Nepal border has wreaked havoc in the Himalayan country and the north- east Indian state, but scientists say the likelihood of a much greater earthquake in north India remains. Despite a decade-long upgrade of seismic monitoring instruments, scientists say their data is insufficient to be able to predict quakes anytime this decade. “Technically, this is classified as a moderate quake (with a magnitude less than 7);...