Thousands of children and women die every year in India due to lack of access to basic healthcare. Why is it that, in the Mecca of medical tourism, the poor continue to be denied the right to health? A national television channel had a 30-minute special recently on how private hospitals are denying free medical treatment to poor patients. Under a quota, private hospitals are expected to provide medical treatment...

The government can’t be expected to provide food, education and healthcare to all but relief would be offered to the deprived sections, Chief Justice of India SH Kapadia has said while advocating the adoption of minimum core approach. Saying that the financial meltdown has ushered in a paradigm shift from equality in terms of equal access to minimum core approach, the CJI said, “Equal access to food cannot be given. You...

Fundamentally, our current crisis in food supplies as well as food prices arises out of the sidelining of Jawahar Lal Nehru’s dictum “everything else can wait but not agriculture”. Unfortunately, the last twenty years have been characterised by very low rates of agricultural growth, averaging around one percent per annum. This is almost equal to the rate of GDP growth during the last half century of British rule. In effect, in...

Women in rural India continue to die because of indifference and neglect by healthcare authorities... This is a public health warning. Do not express concern for the state of healthcare in this country. Do not express anger that women die because they are either denied care or help is delayed when they have complicated pregnancies. Do not demand that healthcare is an entitlement that the poor have a right to demand...

When we hear the word innovation, we often think of new technologies or silver bullet solutions — like hydrogen fuel cells or a cure for cancer. To be sure, breakthroughs are vital: antibiotics and vaccines, for example, transformed global health. But as we’ve argued in Fixes, some of the greatest advances come from taking old ideas or technologies and making them accessible to millions of people who are underserved. One area...