Audits will look into the money released to the states in the last seven years, says Ghulam Nabi Azad The health ministry will conduct annual audits of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) to detect irregularities in the utilization of funds. Health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has written to the state governments seeking their cooperation on this. “We have decided to go for an audit of NRHM fund utilization across the states,”...

Rising trends in malnutrition among children under six here and in other cities have prompted the Maharashtra government to introduce an Urban Malnutrition Mission from next month, official sources said. A quarter of children below six years in the city weighed at anganwadis are underweight, according to the latest monthly progress report (MPR) of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). Non-governmental organisations point to a severe crisis of primary health...

Arundhati has got it all wrong—the facts speak out against her romantic notions of the tribals’ fight Nirad C. Chaudhary wrote in The Continent of Circe that India’s tribals were mainly found in hill forests. This was because, he reasoned, they had been chased there by the invading Aryans, who displaced them from their river plains. In an essay published in this magazine (Capitalism: A Ghost Story, March 26), Arundhati Roy...

Women in India face discrimination even when it comes to their heart health.  Three separate studies - one of them from India and the other two from China and West Asia - presented at the World Congress of Cardiology in Dubai on Friday said that women don't receive the same treatment as men for heart disease across the world.  They said that women with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) receive inferior or less...

Nearly 138 million Indian smokers do not know that smoking tobacco causes stroke. As many as 92 million on the other hand aren't aware that tobacco causes heart disease. According to a report released on Friday by the World Heart Federation, half of all Chinese smokers and one-third of Indian and Vietnamese smokers are unaware of the risks tobacco poses to our heart. Awareness of the risk of second-hand smoke is even lower. Around...