It will be offered as National Health Package for all common conditions Strongly recommending a re-configuration of the entire health system where the government will have a major role to play, a high level expert group on Universal Health Coverage (UHC) has proposed making health care an entitlement to every citizen. The group suggested that health care be offered as a National Health Package (NHP) covering all common conditions and high-impact health...

About 9% of the country's population comprises scheduled tribes, with over 700 communities, of which 75 are 'primitive tribal groups'. Yet, we found on a number of field trips to Andhra Pradesh, conditions among scheduled and primitive tribes differ according to policy whims, and little else. In a village in Vijanagaram district, we found two distinct tribes living side by side: Kondavara, a scheduled tribe, and Savara, a primitive tribe. The...

Amid policy battles over food production, energy resources and economic decline, one untapped natural resource that is guaranteed to boost production on a global scale has been stubbornly overlooked – the power of women in the labour force. According to the World Bank's 2012 World Development Report (WDR) "Gender Equality and Development", ensuring equal access for women farmers would increase maize yields by 11 to 16 percent in Malawi and 17...

China has reduced deaths among newborn babies by almost two-thirds in little over a decade — an unprecedented success rate that a new study says holds lessons for countries like India still struggling with high neonatal and maternal mortality rates. Deaths among newborn babies fell from 24.7 per 1,000 in 1996 to 9.3 in 2008 — a 62-per-cent decrease — according to a paper published in The Lancet medical journal on...

Managing our soil and water resources in a sustainable and equitable manner needs a new political vision, which can be expressed through the proposed Land Acquisition Bill and the recently formed Global Soil Partnership. On the basis of a proposal I had made three years ago, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) launched a Global Soil Partnership for Food Security and Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation at a multi-stakeholder conference, held...