India has not reported a single Polio case over the past one year, but Bihar has gone a step further by maintaining a clean slate for the past 16 months. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently deleted India from the list of Polio endemic countries, the first time that the country has been ticked out of the map. The last Polio case in India was reported from Howrah district of Bengal on...

-The Telegraph The World Health Organisation has deleted India from its list of Polio endemic countries, acknowledging the absence of any new instance of illness caused by the wild Polio virus for more than a year since a child was diagnosed with the disease in Howrah in January 2011. “This is the first time in history we’re able to put up a map like this one,” Bruce Aylward, an assistant director-general for...

Just over five years ago, a global study had labelled India the world’s “lone Polio exporter”, prompting the United Nations secretary-general to write a letter of concern to Manmohan Singh. Even three years ago, anti-Polio workers in western Uttar Pradesh, then the disease’s epicentre in India, were often abused and driven away when they came to the villages for the vaccination programme. Such memories today flooded into the minds of doctors and...

-IANS   India has a reason to smile on the Polio front, as it was taken off the list of Polio endemic countries by the World Health Organisation (WHO), health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad announced at the Polio Summit 2012 held at Vigyan Bhawan on Saturday.  The summit had Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also in attendance.  "WHO has taken India's name off the list of Polio endemic countries in view of the remarkable progress...

While welcoming the report of the High Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage for India for its comprehensive vision and many well-conceived recommendations, this article focuses on the conditions needed for its promise to bear fruit. Towards this, it explores the political dimension, which comprises the forces and interests that come into play to shape and reconfigure administrative policy and its implementation.   We are grateful to Anand Zachariah and Susie...