-Economic and Political Weekly The draft National Health Policy 2015 is an improvement over its predecessors--the policies of 1984 and 2002. However, it also reveals several gaps, inconsistencies and blind spots which tend to dilute otherwise constructive proposals. The purpose of this article is to open up the draft to further public debate and comment. Forum for Medical Ethics Society (fmesmumbai@gmail.com) is a voluntary, non-profit organisation registered in Mumbai. The society was...

-TheWire.in It’s high time Hindus and Sikhs learned from their neighbours of other religions how to save millions of “missing women” The release of the latest census data on religion has whipped up a media storm. The focus has been on the two largest communities − Hindus (79.8%) and Muslims (14.2%). But one significant trend between them seems to have been largely overlooked. In 1991 and 2001, Muslims and Hindus had virtually similar...

-The Indian Express While decadal growth rates are declining among all religious communities, the decline has been sharper among Muslims than among Hindus over the last three decades. The Census 2011 data on Population by Religious Communities, released by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, confirms the declining trend in population growth rate in the country. While decadal growth rates are declining among all religious communities, the decline has been...

-Economic and Political Weekly While insufficient sanitation facilities often get represented in statistics and are reported in the literature on urban infrastructure planning and contested urban spaces, what is often left out is the everyday practice and experience of going to dysfunctional toilets, particularly by women. By analysing the practices and problems associated with toilet use from a phenomenological perspective, this article aims to situate the issue in the everyday lives...

-The Hindu Thanks to the caste system, India has always been an unequal society. What is even more worrying is that inequality appears to have deepened in the past two decades The Boston Consulting Group’s 15th annual report, “Winning the Growth Game: Global Wealth 2015”, has received extensive coverage in the Indian media. The report comes on top of the Global Wealth Databook 2014 from Credit Suisse, which provides a much more...