-The Hindu Bangalore: It is a move that will bring a positive change to preventive healthcare, including maternal and disease-control programmes. The State government is all set to provide mobile phones to all the 35,000 Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) in the State. These activists are community health workers in the World Bank-sponsored National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), which is being implemented by the Union government across the country. According to...

-The Hindu As the country develops economically, its double burden of malnutrition and its health implications will increasingly affect women and those who are socio-economically weak India has one of the highest burdens of underweight women in the world, with rising obesity levels. Using the World Health Organisation classification based on body mass index, or BMI (the ratio of the weight of the body in kilograms to the square of its height...

-The Hindu In addition to ailments caused by poverty, salt pan workers across the country suffer from several occupational diseases, including chronic dermatitis, loss of vision and hypothyroidism In Adivasi Colony, a remote hamlet off the road from Vedaranyam to Kodikarai in Tamil Nadu, most of the adults in the 200-odd households work in salt manufacturing. They prepare salt pans manually, irrigate them with saline water which is three times saltier than...

-The Hindu The Union Ministry of Labour has done well to raise the salary cap for availing Employees' State Insurance (ESI) to Rs.25,000. While the move is expected to expand coverage to an additional five million workers and their dependents, this is still small comfort in a country where barely three per cent of the workforce enjoys any social protection. The evolution of ESI has been characterised by an accent...

-The Hindu More needs to be done to enforce the law banning manual scavenging. This monsoon, India's Parliament passed a law of enormous social significance prohibiting and punishing manual scavenging, which remains the most degrading form of untouchability and caste discrimination in the country. This is not the first time this practice was outlawed: untouchability and forced labour were forbidden in the Constitution itself and, in 1993, a law was first passed...