Health is a state of mental, social and physical well-being and not merely an absence of disease or infirmity. To achieve this noble objective, India requires health care professionals who are trained in institutions with standardised infrastructure, and the availability of accessible and equitable health care for both the rural and urban populace. Recently, the health sector has been in the news — from the creation of a rural based...

The claim that the Unique Identification project will facilitate the delivery of basic health services is dishonest. AMONG the many reasons cited for India to proceed with the Unique Identification (UID) project – that it will facilitate delivery of basic services, that it will plug leakages in public expenditure, that it will speed up achievement of targets in social sector schemes, and so on – the most specious is perhaps the...

Even as the world welcomed the seven billionth member of the global population this week, medical researchers warned that rapid-growth economies such as India still had a high proportion of Morbidity, with more than 290 million Indians suffering from Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). In an article ‘A disproportionate burden of NTDs found in India and South Asia,' tropical diseases scientists said though India and South Asia had made significant economic progress,...

-Live Mint   As United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi prepares to intervene next week in the great national debate about who is poor, she might want to visit north-eastern Mumbai to see how the poorest are not even classified as such and how a giant government scheme to save their children from malnutrition is failing. The nauseating stench from a mountain of garbage greets a visitor to Rafi Nagar at the base...

The nation wants to know how often teenagers pop the emergency contraceptive pill. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) will support and finance research projects that will look at the pill's use and overuse. Emergency Contraceptive Pills (ECPs) are used to prevent pregnancy following an unprotected act of sexual intercourse within 72 hours. The council has called for research proposals by December 31 on emergency contraception, especially those that will look...