Free bus passes to persons living with HIV were handed over to beneficiaries in Madurai and Dindigul districts by the respective Collectors. People living with HIV, who are receiving free anti-retroviral therapy (ART), had good reason to celebrate Pongal as they received the passes which would enable them to travel to the ART centres free of cost, officials said. While distributing the passes, Madurai Collector C. Kamaraj said that helping people...

Emily Esplen visited a community in Dhaka where inspiring community organisers are showing change is possible When I met members of the Dalit Women's Forum in Dhaka last month, they told me about the changes they want to see in their lives and communities. They want their daughters to go to school and stay in school. They want privacy and security when bathing in communal areas. They want health care and...

A Bachelor of Rural Healthcare course is one of the proposed solutions: Azad Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare Ghulam Nabi Azad has called for “out of the box” solutions to reach out to remote areas so that health services can be provided there at the earliest. Speaking at a two-day national conference of State Health Ministers and Health Secretaries here on Wednesday, Mr. Azad said that in many remote areas...

When a group of 46 cooks in northern Gujarat—some of whom had been working for up to seven years—demanded full payment for their labour, they were threatened, beaten, then finally thrown out with little more than the clothes they were wearing. The group—which included women and children—were all migrants from a tribal region in southern Rajasthan. They walked for three days without food to get to the nearest train station,...

The debate on the climate negotiations, instead of discussing the nature of any policy shift, should define the national position and determine red lines for future negotiations. A new paradigm has emerged at Cancun. Instead of the multilaterally agreed emissions reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol, there is now a shared target for all countries, where deep cuts in greenhouse gases are required according to science. Developed countries are to take...