Winter in the Indian capital is a season of mists, minus the mellow fruitfulness. The air becomes charged with toxic emissions and particles that cannot disperse due to a meteorological phenomenon called "atmospheric inversion". According to B.P. Yadav, scientist with the meteorological department, atmospheric inversion is caused by a warming of the upper layers of the atmosphere, trapping colder air on the surface and, with it, vehicular and industrial emissions. "The immediate...

A Bachelor of Rural Healthcare course is one of the proposed solutions: Azad Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare Ghulam Nabi Azad has called for “out of the box” solutions to reach out to remote areas so that health services can be provided there at the earliest. Speaking at a two-day national conference of State Health Ministers and Health Secretaries here on Wednesday, Mr. Azad said that in many remote areas...

One more effort to make government reconsider objections The Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council (NAC) has decided to stick to its recommendations made on the draft National Food Security Bill at its meeting on October 23 last, though these have been rejected by a government committee led by C. Rangarajan, who heads the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council. The committee was constituted by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to examine the feasibility of...

When a group of 46 cooks in northern Gujarat—some of whom had been working for up to seven years—demanded full payment for their labour, they were threatened, beaten, then finally thrown out with little more than the clothes they were wearing. The group—which included women and children—were all migrants from a tribal region in southern Rajasthan. They walked for three days without food to get to the nearest train station,...

One out of every five children from the tribal talukas of Thane could be suffering from a serious heart ailment. This was the diagnosis of a medical camp conducted by the district health officer at Wada, 75 km from Thane, recently. Of the 125 children in the 4-15 age group, who underwent the echocardiogram test, 25 were detected with abnormal heart movements, setting off alarm bells in the local medical...