With institutional healthcare being prohibitively expensive, more women in rural India are choosing to deliver at home than in hospitals and healthcare facilities, says a new report brought out by Chittorgarh-based NGO, Prayas, in partnership with Oxfam India. The 'Study of the trends in out-of-pocket payments in healthcare during National Rural Health Mission period (2005-2010)', released on October 12 in the national capital, was conducted across five Indian states - Assam,...

Narendra Modi’s Gujarat is the only developed state in the country where the percentage of malnourished children is higher than the national average, a government report released today said. Gujarat has 44.6 per cent underweight children, compared to the country’s average of nearly 42 per cent. Six other states have a higher-than-average proportion of malnourished children but all of these are poor — Madhya Pradesh (60 per cent), followed by Jharkhand (56.5),...

Kashmir, which India considers as the core of its unity in diversity, is turning out to be the Great Divider of the activists. Medha Patkar, one of the flag-bearers of the activist armada in the country, today termed Kashmir an integral part of India, leaving a section of her supporters embarrassed and fuming. Patkar, who is also associated with Team Anna whose key member Prashant Bhushan was last week roughed up for...

-The Telegraph   The Centre has decided to take the help of the church to minimise the use of tobacco in Mizoram, after it was found that the state was home to the highest number of tobacco users in the country. The chief medical officer of the directorate-general of health services, Jagdish Kaur, revealed this here today during the release of the northeastern region’s factsheet of the Global Adult Tobacco Survey at NEDFi...

-AP   An estimated 100,000 people in India may have escaped HIV infection over five years thanks to one of the world’s biggest prevention programmes, an encouraging sign that targeting high-risk groups remains vital even as more donors focus on treatment, a new study suggests. While the initial findings regarding the $258 million Avahan project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, come with large uncertainty due to data limitations and methodology,...