All doctors, who have an undergraduate medical degree from abroad, will have to appear for a screening test before they can practise in India. This rule will also apply for Indian doctors with post-graduate (PG) medical degrees from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. Doctors with an UG degree from India and a PG degree from these six countries have been allowed by the Union health ministry to...

Alleging that the UP government had failed to provide the prescribed 23% quota to scheduled castes in government services, chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) PL Punia claimed it was also misutilising the funds meant for the dalit. Talking to media on Monday evening, Punia said as per the ratio of the scheduled castes in the total population of the state, a provision had been made to...

The West Bengal government has decided to reserve 17 per cent seats in all government and government-aided colleges for students belonging to the other backward classes (OBCs), with effect from the coming academic session. This was announced in the Assembly by Higher Education Minister Sudarshan Roy Chowdhury on Thursday. “The question of reservation of seats in higher education to expand opportunities to OBCs has been under the consideration of the State government...

The National Commission for Scheduled Castes Sunday rejected the Uttar Pradesh government's claims of bringing down incidents of violence against Dalits, terming them 'baseless and misleading'. The commission's newly-appointed chairman P.L. Punia said the state government released figures of only the first six months of this year, and atrocities against Dalits had actually registered a steep rise over the three-and-a-half year rule of Bahujan Samaj Party, according to statistics by National...

KEY TRENDS   • Maternal Mortality Ratio for India was 370 in 2000, 286 in 2005, 210 in 2010, 158 in 2015 and 145 in 2017. Therefore, the MMRatio for the country decreased by almost 61 percent between 2000 and 2017 *14    • As per the NSS 71st round, among rural females aged 5-29 years, the main reasons for dropping out/ discontinuance were: engagement in domestic activities, not interested in education, financial constraints and marriage. Among rural males aged...