-The Hindu What happened at Shishubhawan is symptomatic of how deep the rot is in India's crumbling public health infrastructure. It has been two months since news and reports of the deaths of 40 infants at Shishubhawan, the largest paediatric care centre in eastern India, broke. The facility is for critically-ill children from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha. By the end of September, 56 deaths were reported in a span on 12 days. Even...
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Health scheme beneficiaries pay from own pockets -Mihika Basu
-The Indian Express TISS report maps pitfalls in Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana Mumbai: OVER three-fifths or 63 per cent beneficiaries of the state government’s Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana (RGJAY) made out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for services after admission to hospitals, and a significantly higher proportion of patients from Below Poverty Line (BPL) families (88.23 per cent) reported paying for diagnostics, medications, or consumables, according to a report by the Tata...
More »Children’s deaths from pneumonia, diarrhoea bring India shame -Ramya Kannan
-The Hindu India has the highest number of pneumonia and diarrhoea deaths among children globally, reports the International Vaccine Access Centre (IVAC) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The 2015 annual report of the IVAC reads like a repeat of last year’s report card, despite the progress the country is making to accelerate immunisation. With 2,97,114 deaths, India is once again at the top of the list of countries with...
More »Holding power to account -Aruna Roy & Nikhil Dey
-The Hindu Ten years of implementation of the Right to Information Act has spawned a new breed of activism and citizenship The Right to Information (RTI) Act has completed 10 years of implementation. According to a conservative estimate based on the Information Commission’s annual reports, there are at least 50 lakh RTI applications filed in India every year. The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative used the data to estimate that just under 1...
More »Bihar exit poll debacle: Elections have become a media carnival -Siddharth Bhatia
-The Hindustan Times The stereotype of a reporter landing in a new city and then getting political insights from the taxi driver on the way from the airport is not without merit. For a visitor, the first encounter is with the cabbie, and cabbies, as assumed, have not just local knowledge, but much wisdom too. A cabbie’s views often get extrapolated and incorporated into much of the reporting. As true as this...
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