Defending the alternative model for undergraduate medical education to create a separate cadre of “rural doctors,” Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Thursday that the scheme would not compromise with the quality of medical education or reduce the importance of trained and specialised doctors. Inaugurating a two-day national workshop here to discuss the programme for starting a specialised course of Bachelor of Rural Medicine and...

While a country like China devised practical ways to deliver healthcare to rural populations by deploying its band of ‘barefoot doctors’ from the 1960s in a transitional phase, and then went on to expand full-fledged medical education facilities that enabled national coverage to a great degree, chronic shortages of doctors in rural India six decades after Independence remain a worry. The allopathic doctor-patient ratio is a dismal 1:1,722. Nevertheless, the...

At a time when other countries are cutting down ethanol admixing with vehicular fuel due to tightening supplies of alcohol, India, oddly enough, is doing the reverse. The Union government has forced the states to raise ethanol doping of petrol from 5 per cent to 10 per cent immediately and has set the target of hiking it further to 20 per cent by 2017, least realising that the sugar industry,...

Violence in West Bengal’s western districts has reached crisis proportions. Each day, one or more cadre member or sympathizer of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPM] is killed either by Maoists or the Trinamul Congress (TMC). The Maoists have found common cause with the TMC, a breakaway from the Congress Party in Bengal. Mamata Banerjee, whose authoritarian populism draws from both Juan and Evita Peron, leads the TMC. Backed...

Like an avalanche, the groundswell of scepticism regarding the melting of Himalayan glaciers threatens to demolish conventional wisdom to the contrary. To be sure, the deadline of 2035 by which these glaciers would be severely threatened has now been proved wrong. It could be a typographical error, as the Russian scientist whose paper has been used mentioned 2305. Or it could have been LICence on the part of some scientists,...