-The Hindu New Delhi travelled to tribal heartland. The expert group offers hope; an opportunity to ensure that the tribals have a say in policies that are framed for them. Earlier this month, a motley group of 50 academicians, government officials and activists gathered at Shodhgram village in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district. This is an area known for malaria, malnutrition and Maoists, not necessarily in that order. Everyone left technology behind (mobile phones and...
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Hand-Washing and Public Health -Lekha D Bhat, Kesavan Rajasekharan Nayar, Hisham Moosan, Sanjeev Nair, and Muhammed Shaffi
-Economic and Political Weekly The importance of hand-washing in personal and public hygiene has evolved over the centuries. While the market with its countless number of soaps and hand-wash products for personal hygiene with the accompanying advertising has created a false sense of security, it is community hygiene implemented through public health measures that is really effective in the battle against disease. Lekha D Bhat (lekhabhatd@gmail.com) teaches at the Department of Social...
More »Keeping a finger on the pulse economy -Yoginder K Alagh
-The Tribune To ensure stable prices of pulses and attractive returns for producers, policies of domestic prices and tariffs should blend. Import duties must be calibrated with demand. As the Indian economy grows at a rate of 7 per cent plus, assuming low growth as an aberration, the food basket will diversify. Within grains, the movement will be to pulses as shown by the expert group on pulse production. The yield and...
More »Dr Imrana Qadeer, public health scholar and professor at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health (JNU), speaks to Poornima Joshi
-The Hindu Business Line How the Indian State metamorphosed from protector of the poor to facilitator of the private health industry If there is correlation between two incidents of the Central Government announcing cuts in the health budget and dengue patients being refused treatment in Delhi’s private hospitals, it is rarely discussed in the ongoing media debate on the subject. A new collection of researched essays edited by public health scholar Imrana...
More »GM cotton: whitefly attack raises anxiety among farmers -Vikas Vasudeva
-The Hindu PAU is now recommending farmers to sow traditional non-Bt varieties of American and indigenous cotton The ineffectiveness of genetically modified (GM) cotton against the recent whitefly attack in Punjab and Haryana, which witnessed widespread protests by farmers, has raised concern among agricultural experts and farmers over the growing dependency on Bt cotton. They believe it is time for India to actively promote and involve public-private partnership (PPP) model in GM crop...
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