Anti-microbial resistance, theme of this year's World Health Day Drug resistance renders medicines ineffective Celebrating World Health Day 2011, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has called for intensification of the global commitment to safeguard antibiotics for future generations. With growing resistance by microbes to antibiotics threatening the continued effectiveness of many medicines, WHO has made anti-microbial resistance the theme of this year's World Health Day. It has urged governments and stakeholders to implement policies...

The battle against poverty and inequity can be won only if governments focus on the welfare of adolescents, says a UNICEF report. FINALLY, it has been recognised that adolescents constitute a very critical category in the overall battle against poverty and inequity. It is for this reason that the United Nations Children's Fund's (UNICEF) flagship report, “The State of the World's Children 2011”, focusses exclusively on adolescents and cautions against neglecting...

Cash transfer as substitute for state service provision is a dangerous recipe for callously anti-poor and corrupt governance. THE staggering number of recent articles, papers and books on the virtues of giving cash in place of public services to the poor has created an impression that a sort of epidemic has broken out. Economists, policymakers, bureaucrats and newspaper commentators are all infected by it and are in turn infecting others. The central...

Census 2011 has brought glad tidings on the literacy front. Delhi's literacy rate - recorded as 86.34% - has gone up by 4.67% in comparison to Census 2001, which recorded a literacy rate of 81.67%. One of the significant developments is the narrowing of the gap between male and female literacy rate - a drop of 2.53% - which is also the highest dip recorded so far. The difference between...

Distribution of basic food grains and fuel at controlled prices every month through the Public Distribution System (PDS) could be the largest service provided by the Indian State, touching as it does over 65 million families through a network of nearly half a million retail shops. Given that the urban middle class has little stake in the health of the PDS, there have to be some compelling reasons for the...