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...

All epidemiological data in Chhattisgarh are ‘guesstimates' Underestimation of malaria mortality figures public hospitals ill-equipped to handle severe cases Last week, the medical journal Lancet published the results of a malaria survey undertaken by researchers as part of the Million Deaths Study, an ambitious programme that strives to document the causes of nearly one million deaths in India from the period 1998 to 2014. As per the survey 2,05,000 Indians die of malaria every...

In 1957, the Communist Party of Kerala became the first democratically elected communist government in Asia. While many in the West feared that this election would help communism spread across South Asia and make Kerala the "Yan'an of India", the Keralite communists' actions were checked by Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress party's control of the federal coffers. Instead, from within the political bounds of India's divided government, Kerala initiated what has...

The Millennium Development declaration was a visionary document, which sought partnership between rich and poor nations to make globalisation a force for good. Its signatories agreed to explicit goals on a specific timeline. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set ambitious targets for reducing hunger, poverty, infant and maternal mortality, for reversing the spread of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and giving children basic education by 2015. These also included gender equality,...

Tamil Nadu will soon have a centralised data resource centre to collect relevant data across all health departments. The Health Management Information System (HMIS), accessible across the various departments, will be able to function as a one-stop shop for all information on health in Tamil Nadu, and as such will be able to influence policy-making in the health sector, according to S. Vijayakumar, project director, Tamil Nadu Health Systems Project (TNHSP). Once...