-Economic and Political Weekly The draft National Health Policy 2015 is an improvement over its predecessors--the policies of 1984 and 2002. However, it also reveals several gaps, inconsistencies and blind spots which tend to dilute otherwise constructive proposals. The purpose of this article is to open up the draft to further public debate and comment. Forum for Medical Ethics Society (fmesmumbai@gmail.com) is a voluntary, non-profit organisation registered in Mumbai. The society was...

-Hindustan Times Ranchi: Bankers come in pint size at an urban slum in Ranchi. And they run a bank for the children, by the children and of the children. Ten-year-old Nisha Kumari has an account in the bank — Children’s Development Khazana (CDK)—which opened in 2014. And her small pleasures of childhood is not held hostage to the priorities of her poor family. “During Durga Puja last year, a few relatives had visited...

-The Indian Express Wells dry up across 8 districts, storage down to less than 8%, residents trudge long distances, officials brace for worst drinking water crisis in 40 years. Beed/ Parbhani (Maharashtra): Seventy-year-old Parobai Shinde, carrying an aluminium pot that has seen better days, is briskly walking the 2-km stretch from her home in Manyarwadi village in Georai taluka in Beed district to Bharat Sonmali’s field. Sonmali is reploughing his 30...

-TheWire.in Sometimes, the more newspapers write on a subject, the more obscure it becomes, especially if it comes dressed in apocalyptic fervour. On August 26, most media reports on the just released Census 2011 data on ‘population by religious community’ could easily have been mistaken for a present-day stock market update: Hindus slide from 80.5 % to 79.8 %; Muslims climb from 13.4 % to 14.2 %, showing the highest surge...

-HuffingtonPost.in In the foothills of the Himalayas, on the outskirts of Dehradun in a town called Rajpur, sits a bustling network of co-operatives strung together by a family of American social entrepreneurs. If one is fortunate enough to venture to this specific community in India, one would never guess that hundreds of jobs are being supported in different pockets by the Murray's desire to create opportunity for artisans with challenging lives....