Opening more medical colleges is not the solution to India’s chronic shortage of doctors in the rural areas.  India is the largest supplier of foreign medical graduates to the United States and the United Kingdom. Yet, its own rural areas have remained chronically deprived of professional doctors. The historical antecedents of these shortages could be traced to a landmark health policy document, the Bhore Committee Report of 1946. That report...

Some 300 million children in South Asia, or half of the region’s under-18 population, suffer from chronic levels of poverty, according to a new United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) study presented today at the opening of a conference in Bangladesh. To combat the enormous amount of poverty afflicting children, UNICEF urged leaders across the region to strengthen efforts tackling the lack of food, education, health, information, shelter, water and sanitation for...

The United Nations Development Programme-sponsored 2009 Human Development Report on migration, “Overcoming Barriers: Human mobility and Development” has been widely acknowledged as a path-breaking study on human movement. Shattering the many myths around migration, the report concludes that most migration is in fact beneficial, and calls for supporting policies to ease barriers to free movement. Senior Assistant Country Director, UNDP, K. Seeta Prabhu. discusses the report with The Hindu For...

The United Nations’ Human Development Report of 2009 paints an idyllic picture of migrations. THE recently released United Nations Development Report-2009, titled “Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development”, presents a strong case for governments all over the world to encourage human mobility. Migrations, including those of low-skilled workforce, pay dividends all round, the report says. However, it does not quite attempt to seriously understand why people migrate, sometimes subjecting themselves...

Breaking decades of silence over unjust social norms, widowed, abandoned and destitute women from different states in India came together at the national capital to launch the National Forum for Single Women's Rights to demand food, healthcare, employment and rights to property. It has been more than eight years since the January 2001 earthquake struck the Indian state of Gujarat, but Hansa Rathore still cannot quite shake off memories of...