Hundreds of thousands of sick people in India are suffering unnecessary and excruciating pain because of a lack of funds, according to a new report. The Human Rights Watch group says that budgetary constraints result in poor medical training, restrictive drug regulations and poor patient care. The group says that many major cancer hospitals do not provide patients with the painkilling drug, morphine. This is even though it has a reputation...

Sitting on an iron bench along a busy street, Chaman Lal sticks his fingers into a mug full of a greasy concoction and then applies the dark-red brew to areas where his patients complain of pain. Lal -- who does not have a license to practice medicine, but claims to be a successful bone doctor and traditional healer -- says this potion of 18 herbs is a cure-all. His large signboard,...

A new report released by UNICEF and the World Health Organization today lays out a seven-point plan to reduce the incidence of diarrhoea worldwide. Diarrhoea is the second leading killer of children. Nearly one in five children under the age of five dies as a result of dehydration, weakened immunity or malnutrition associated with diarrhoea. But it is a preventable and easily treatable disease. “It is a tragedy that diarrhoea,...

Many grassroots activists in Chhattisgarh are circulating a note among all democratic elements in the country to raise the demand of de-escalation of conflict between the security forces and the adivasis. They want lakhs of displaced adivasis of Dantewada be allowed to return to their villages and rebuild their ravaged agrarian and forest based economies. However, this time they also want an assurance from the state government on right to...

The tragic demise of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy is a blow to the rights approach to development in India. YSR, as the medical doctor-turned-CM was popularly known, was a pioneer of at least one hundred path breaking rural schemes such as the NREGS and old age pensions that were offered to the poor not as dole but as a matter of right. For records, the first...