-The Business Standard   One of Sewa's triumphs is formation of the Mahila SEWA Sahakari Bank In April 10 this year, SEWA, the Self-Employed Women’s Association, which prefers to describe itself as a cooperative or trade union rather than a microfinance institution (MFI) (though it straddles both spheres), with a membership of 1.3 million women, completed 40 years of its existence. This gives us an ideal opportunity to review its historic contribution to...

The Bill to regulate medical education and govern human resource in health is a highly diluted version of the original draft. Distortions in the area of Human Resource for Health (HRH) are the root cause of many of the ills facing the health sector in India. Among them is the shortage of qualified medical professionals. The estimated density of 19 health workers (qualified and unqualified) per 10,000 population is nearly 25...

The government and the MCI dither on a proposed course to provide better primary health care in villages. On February 27, the Delhi High Court slapped contempt notices on the Union Health Secretary and the Chairperson of the Medical Council of India (MCI) for their non-compliance with its order of November 10, 2010, to initiate measures to introduce a “Bachelor of Rural Health Care (BRHC)” course of three and a half...

-The Business Standard When the anti-Posco brigade celebrated the seventh anniversary of their agitation against the mega steel venture of the South Korean behemoth at Dhinkia near Paradip in Odisha last week, the noise they made against the project was drowned by the murmurs of a split in their ranks. After fighting against the project for the last seven years, Posco Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS) seems to be disintegrating, with many of...

-PTI The government today told the Supreme Court that “auction cannot be the only permissible method for disposal of natural resources” and a uniform poLICy on their distribution was “neither practical nor can it subserve the common good”. The Centre also said the allocation of natural resources was a poLICy matter and beyond the purview of judicial review. The submissions came in response to questions by the apex court on the Presidential Reference...