It is quite likely that a few weeks from now someone will be knocking at your doors and asking for your fingerprints. If you agree, your fingerprints will enter a national database, along with personal characteristics (age, sex, occupation, and so on) that have already been collected from you, unless you were missed in the “Census household listing” earlier this year. The purpose of this exercise is to build the National...

Rahul Gandhi, the general secretary of India’s Congress party, often says that there exist “two Indias” — one of the rich, and one of the poor. Those two Indias were in evidence a couple of weeks ago, when closely timed events on opposite sides of the planet brought into relief the deep divides that in many ways define this country. In Mumbai on Nov. 7, President Barack Obama told a group of...

Writes to Azad expressing concern over its inclusion in public health programme The Union government's decision to allow the use of injectable contraceptives, as part of the public health programme in the country, would be a harmful step that will affect the health of women, Member of Parliament and Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat has said. In a letter to the Union Health and Family Welfare Minister...

As the country grapples with a “mixed burden” of diseases that beset the developing as well as developed countries, Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on Monday said adequate research was needed to deal with the challenge of non-communicable and re-emerging diseases. Addressing the centenary celebrations of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) here, Mr. Azad said as the country moved from a developing nation to the...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...