-The Telegraph New Delhi: The gender gap in healthcare spending is increasing in India, and even educated and wealthy households spend less on women's health than on men's, scientists have reported. Demographers and other experts have documented for over a century how Indians discriminate against girls in healthcare and general well-being. New research now suggests that this gender disparity is amplified in adults and has increased over time. An analysis from two nationwide...

-The Hindu Business Line How trained youth from rural India fare in urban work spaces Yesterday was World Youth Skills Day (July 15), an opportune time to meet some of the country’s rural youth who have recently skilled under government programmes and moved to work in the Delhi NCR region. Outside their comfort zone and working in the competitive, urban environment for the first time, life can be challenging on all fronts. Ask 30-year-old...

-The Hindu Why are children in Kerala’s Muslim-dominated Kozhikode and Malappuram districts dying of diphtheria? Propaganda by orthodox Muslim community leaders and alternative medicine practitioners that vaccination is un-Islamic is the main cause, reports Rajeev G.R. Her years of clinical experience had not prepared her for that damp, rainy night when death lingered in the air inside the operation theatre. As Mohammad Afzaz (14) desperately gasped for air, he told her, “You...

-Civil Society Nalgonda (Telangana): Mamatha arrived at the Nalgonda District Hospital atop the fuel tank of her uncle’s motorcycle. She weighed just 650 grammes. She had been wrapped in a small sheet of cellophane and put in some kind of a folder. Her mother at that time was fighting for her own life after the premature delivery in the 28th week of her pregnancy. She had high blood pressure and was bleeding. The...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Free health-care services during childbirth remain a pipe dream for most of India's poor, whether it relates to diagnostic tests, medicines, transport or even food, despite the Union health ministry launching a "free entitlements" programme five years ago. The families of most women who seek childbirth in government Hospitals are forced to pay for supposedly "free" services, at times experiencing catastrophic expenditures likely to accentuate their poverty, two...