The Orissa High Court on Tuesday quashed all the land acquisition procedures for the Vedanta University that was proposed to be established on a sprawling 8,000 acres near the Konark-Puri marine drive. Terming the State government's notifications made to acquire and award the land in favour of the Anil Agarwal Foundation (AAF) for the proposed varsity as ‘illegal' and ‘bad in the eye of law,' a Division Bench of the court...

An estimated 41 million people have been cured of tuberculosis (TB) over the past 15 years through a treatment strategy recommended by the United Nations health agency, according to a new report, but success remains fragile and governments must strengthen their determination to combat the disease. “With 1.7 million people dying from tuberculosis last year – including 380,000 women, many of whom were young mothers – these successes are far too...

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...

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...

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,...