Health targets fail as they are set without strategies. The 12th Five-Year Plan should be used to look at the changes needed in the public health system. Health is currently a privilege in India. Not a right. Maternal and child health remains neglected even after countless plans, programmes and political proclamations. Every year, nearly 60,000 women die in pregnancy and childbirth, while approximately 1.7 million children less than five years of...

More than one billion people will not get the basic sanitation and the clean water promised as such projects shrink sharply as a proportion of global aid budgets. A key development goal to halve the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015 will be missed because donor countries have diverted aid money away from unglamorous water projects, according to the World Bank and the charity WaterAid. Aid to...

  Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...

The episodes of violence in land acquisition by the government, as witnessed recently in Bhatta-Parsaul in Uttar Pradesh and in other states earlier, occur because patterns of violence are inbuilt into the process. Despite a bill pending in Parliament since 2007, there has been little effort by political parties to evolve a consensus on acquisition of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes. The law as at present and also the provisions...

Poor Andhra villagers now victims of clinical drug trials No Drug Resistance     * 35 women, some men from Guntur district put throughclinical trials of a breast cancer drug. They later complain of joint pains, nausea and chest pains.     * Biotech industry in Andhra is worth about Rs 455 crore     * Touts operating on behalf of pharma companies get people from the poorer districts to Hyderabad for the tests *** Some 35 women...