-The Hindu Business Line Battling childhood diarrhoea with an Indian vaccine is good strategy Almost half of India's 1,76,000 diarrhoeal deaths in children below five are caused by rotavirus, the pathogen responsible for severe childhood diarrhoea. In addition, 8 lakh hospitalisations and over 30 lakh outpatient visits each year among children below 5 are triggered by diarrhoea of rotavirus origin. WHO recommends the rotavirus vaccine for infants in all national immunisation programmes. Globally,...

-The Telegraph In her recent book, Green Wars, the environmental journalist Bahar Dutt, writes: "The editor of a leading media house, everytime I pitched a green story, would invariably complain: ‘Environmentalism is stalling growth; all I am interested in is double-digit growth for this country.'" The idea that environmental protection and economic progress are at odds is widely held among India's elite. It is shared by newspaper editors, economists, businessmen, and, not...

-The Deccan Herald The poverty line continues to be a conundrum. The fixing of the poverty line at Rs 47 for urban areas and Rs. 32 in rural areas per capita per day by the latest Rangarajan committee report, based on a person or family's spending per day (called ‘consumption expenditure') has again drawn vociferous criticism. All these years, this all important line has not been fixed in a rational manner, rendering...

-The Hindu   6.1 per cent households source their drinking water from untreated sources: report It's no secret that the Capital annually suffers from an alarming rise in the cases of cholera, acute diarrhoeal diseases and typhoid after the onset of monsoon. "Contaminated and unsafe water," according to doctors "is one of the most common disease-causing component this season." The Capital's 21.6 per cent households still have no access to Safe Drinking Water within...

-Daily Pioneer Aware that convincing people, particularly in rural India, to build and use toilets in their homes, is a cumbersome task, the Centre has asked the State Governments to rope in various departments like education and health to raise awareness about the importance of sanitation in rural areas. The move aims to make the country open defecation free (ODF) by 2019. The Modi Government in its maiden budget 2014-15 had...