-The Telegraph New Delhi: Health experts today criticised a government delay in implementing a proposed daily drug therapy for tuberculosis patients, meant to reduce the risk of relapse after completion of treatment. Although the health ministry had itself last year released TB treatment standards emphasising a move towards daily therapy, virtually all patients treated under the government TB control programme receive thrice-a-week therapy, which carries a higher risk of relapse. A consortium of...

-Frontline Kerala is facing a situation where health care costs are leading more and more people, not just low-income families, to financial distress. KERALA is once again drawing attention to itself, this time for a persistent trend of a large number of households being pushed into financial ruin because of the expenses incurred for medical care. Several studies have now found evidence for the many facets of this worrying development in a...

-Kafila.org With depressing regularity, the newspapers have been reporting farmers' suicides in many states. Recently, P Sainath wrote on BBC that around 296,438 farmers have committed suicide since 1995. He also mentions that cash crop cultivators of cotton, sugar cane, vanilla, pepper, groundnut etc account for the bulk of those suicides. According to a PIL heard by the Supreme Court in December 2014, around 3146 farmers in Maharashtra have committed suicide...

-The Financial Express With 66% of its population under the age of 35, India is home to the largest cohort of young people in the world-825 million. The median age of the country is just 27 years, much below 37 in the US and 46 in Japan. Numbers like these suggest that India has a competitive advantage over China and other Asian countries-a demographic dividend. But favourable demographics do not imply that...

-The Guardian Universal healthcare is often presented as an idealistic goal that remains out of reach for all but the richest nations. That's not the case, writes Amartya Sen. Look at what has been achieved in Rwanda, Thailand and Bangladesh Twenty-five hundred years ago, the young Gautama Buddha left his princely home, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a state of agitation and agony. What was he so distressed about?...