Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

Seeking to use technology optimally in health service, Orissa is planning to keep infrastructure ready for telementoring by which an experienced surgeon could guide a less experienced doctor from far-off place. “We are aiming to have telementoring for our State. Through the system a mentor (doctor) sitting in a super speciality hospital can guide another surgeon from hundreds of kilometre away from the actual place of operation,” said B. N. Mohanty,...

Healthcare in Assam will no longer remain confined to hospitals and dispensaries. Come January, Dispur will take healthcare to the doorsteps of people living in villages and remote parts of the state. Assam health and family welfare minister Himanta Biswa Sarma today announced that an ambitious scheme, on the lines of the raijor padulit raijor sarkar (people’s government at people’s doorstep) would be launched in January 2011 to make healthcare accessible to...

All epidemiological data in Chhattisgarh are ‘guesstimates' Underestimation of malaria mortality figures Public hospitals ill-equipped to handle severe cases Last week, the medical journal Lancet published the results of a malaria survey undertaken by researchers as part of the Million Deaths Study, an ambitious programme that strives to document the causes of nearly one million deaths in India from the period 1998 to 2014. As per the survey 2,05,000 Indians die of malaria every...

The Rajasthan Budget for 2011-12 will make a special provision for establishment of health sub-centres and primary health centres in the tribal-dominated regions of southern regions in the State, considered remote and geographically difficult to access. State Medical and Health Minister A. A. Khan said at Gainji village in Dungarpur district on Monday that his department's officers would submit the proposals for budgetary allocations at the district level to strengthen the...