It's official now. At the primary healthcare level, there is no difference in the performance of MBBS doctors with five-and-a-half years' training and non-physician clinicians with three years' training who have been called "legal quacks" by the Indian Medical Association (IMA). This has been demonstrated through a study conducted in Chhattisgarh that compared the performance of different types of clinical care providers at the primary care level. Following the controversy...

Ahead of the Millennium Development Goals Summit next week, India has expressed confidence that it would be able to reach its social and economic goals by the 2015 deadline. "India will not only have met the goals but it will be a shining example for other countries, Hardeep Singh Puri, India's envoy to the UN told PTI. "There is concern about some of these targets," Puri added, referring to child and maternal...

Curriculum and classroom teaching in Delhi University at the post-graduate level does not reflect adequate gender sensitivity, a gender audit conducted by the University's women's Study and Development Centre has revealed. As per the post-graduate level gender audit report, though most of the Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines do have gender components in their syllabi, it is inadequate and teacher participation in workshops and seminars on gender issues is “rather low.” The...

A combination of factors led by state policy has enabled the southern State to become a notable achiever with respect to some key indicators of development. In 2001, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen recorded an eyebrow-raising fact in his book, “Development as Freedom”, that Tamil Nadu and Kerala had both achieved much faster rates of decline in fertility than China had achieved since it introduced its one-child policy. That same year, the international...

Though India has seen a dramatic fall in maternal mortality rate (MMR) by 59% between 1990 and 2008, the country is still home to the highest number of women dying during childbirth across the world. India's MMR stood at 570 in 1990, which fell to 470 per 100,000 live births in 1995, 390 in 2000, 280 in 2005 and 230 in 2008. India, which has seen an annual decrease of...