Census 2011 data bring into the open Maharashtra’s terrible record in sex-selective abortions. In early June, Vijaymala Patekar, a mother of four girls, haemorrhaged to death at a hospital in Parli, Beed district, Maharashtra. She was reportedly in her second trimester of pregnancy. Her family had allegedly forced her to abort the foetus when they learnt it was a girl child. Sudam Munde, the doctor who performed the procedure, fled Parli but...

Tuberculosis re-emerges as a major threat as new drug-resistant strains develop because of mismanagement of the disease. At the beginning of the year, doctors at Mumbai’s P.D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre reported that they had 12 patients infected with TDR-TB, or totally drug-resistant tuberculosis, a condition in which the TB bacilli is resistant to all first- and second-line drugs used in the conventional treatment of the disease. Panic...

-The Times of India HYDERABAD: A chunk of kidney patients in the state are under 40 years of age. Worse, most of the cases undergoing dialysis treatment or even kidney transplants are again in their thirties. This disturbing trend in AP will be analyzed as part of a marathon study that aims to unearth the magnitude of and reasons behind the alarming rise of chronic kidney diseases (CKD) among middle-aged people in...

-The Hindu House-hunting for a Muslim in Delhi can be a long and excruciating exercise….  I shudder even now when I think of the incident of my husband, a media relations executive, being called a terrorist. Five years ago, in Dwarka’s Sabka Ghar Apartments here in the Capital, we were not able to get our favourite news channels on cable TV. My husband had been calling the cablewallah without much success. One day...

-The Hindu We are grateful to the busy Minister and his associates for taking the trouble of reading our article and responding to it. But we are concerned that in spite of all the wise talk, the bottom line remains an article of faith — “Aadhaar is a must.” The purpose of our article was to point out, first, that ground realities loom large in this matter, and second, that the role...