Deforestation, poachers, illicit liquor-brewers forcing them to migrate Large-scale deforestation and the disturbances caused by poachers and illicit liquor-brewers could be forcing king cobras to migrate from their natural habitat in bamboo-rich dense evergreen forests to villages nearby. A study conducted by the Researchers of the Department of Zoology, University of Kerala, and the Reptile Study Group, Thiruvananthapuram, has revealed that the king cobra, the world's longest venomous snake, is under...

I remember being disturbed enough to stop watching the 2003 Hindi movie Matrubhumi(motherland). Set in the future, it depicted an Indian village populated only by men. It gets that way after a man, yearning for a boy, publicly drowns his newborn girl in a vat of milk, sparking a custom that wipes out women. So the men watch porn, fornicate with farm animals. A father marries his five sons to...

Girl child survival is skewedeven in those areas of northern India having limited access topublic health facilities and modern ultrasound technology asfamilies ''neglect'' them to ensure there are few survivors,says a new study. Since families can not know the sex of the foetus dueto lack of technology, girls born in these areas facesystematic healthcare neglect, specially in poorer communitiesto ''dispose them off'', says the study. Allowing the umbilical cord of the newly...

While reliable data on health workers in India is difficult to obtain, a report in The Lancet: India series says that the country has roughly 20 health workers per 10,000 population. The figure is arrived at when the workforce is calculated including allopathic doctors (31%), nurses and midwives (30%), pharmacists (11%), practitioners of ayurveda, yoga and naturopathy, unani, siddha, and homoeopathy (9%), and others (9%). In their paper ‘Human Resources for Health...

A number of questions on the Unique Identification (UID) project continue to remain unanswered while the project itself is necessitated by the government's policy shift to play an indirect rather than direct role in providing services, a panel of Researchers told journalists on the sidelines of a public talk on the subject at St. Xavier's College here on Saturday. Usha Ramanathan, researcher on jurisprudence, poverty and rights, said it was not...