The poverty line that the Tendulkar Committee proposes depends on reduced calorie consumption, and fails to provide for reasonable household expenditures on schooling and health.  For some years, the Government of India has been under pressure to change the norms for calculating the official poverty line. Current norms have resulted in gross and manifest underestimation of the numbers of the poor, and, consequently, in the exclusion of hundreds of millions...

Defending the alternative model for undergraduate medical education to create a separate cadre of “rural doctors,” Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Thursday that the scheme would not compromise with the quality of medical education or reduce the importance of trained and specialised doctors. Inaugurating a two-day national workshop here to discuss the programme for starting a specialised course of Bachelor of Rural Medicine and...

Bihar has been in the news recently for recording an average growth rate of 11.3 per cent for the period between 2004 and 2009. Much has been written about the quality of governance and the improved state of roads. This is indeed commendable, and no mean achievement, for a State that had virtually become a “development outcast”. I was pleasantly surprised to note on a recent trip to Bihar the...

Four-year course, including internship, proposed; it would be “institutional” in character  The annual proposed intake for the course is 25 to 50 students Medical Council of India plans to start the course in August The proposed alternative model for under-graduate medical education to create a cadre of rural doctors will be discussed at a two-day workshop beginning here this Thursday. The model, mooted by the Medical Council of India (MCI), is to...

A United Nations report titled The State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples says the indigenous people and tribes worldwide are facing extinction and exploitation due to threats of displacement and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources. It takes note of the displacement of thousands of families of the Santhal Adivasis in the Indian State of Jharkhand as a result of extraction of minerals, without proper compensation or economic security. The...