-Down to Earth   All safe motherhood programmes of the government are focused on institutional deliveries, but health centres are in disarray. Experts suggest ways to reduce deaths during delivery Lal Mohan, a daily wage labourer, has no clue what took his wife's life. Sarita Devi, 25, was expecting her third child, and was on way to a good hospital at Bhagalpur district in Bihar. "She was normal all through the nine months...

-Down to Earth   India's first PM born after Independence will face the old problem of poverty eradication India may have its first post-Independence-born prime minister this June. But what difference would it make in terms of the country's development agenda? How will the new prime minister face the challenges that have been there since before Independence? Or, what are the developmental challenges the new prime minister may find difficult to address? Arguably,...

-The Times of India   CHENNAI: When traditional methods of using chemical pesticides, fogging and releasing Gambusia fish into water bodies fail to do enough to control mosquito menace, a little out-of-the-box thinking is required. Digital interventions are beginning to take over to help grapple with vector-borne diseases. The city corporation's health department is working on an app to monitor the fieldwork of 5,000 workers who visit households to eliminate mosquito breeding...

-The Economic Times   If there are two statistics that summarise a nation's overall well-being, these are the infant mortality rate (IMR) and the maternal mortality rate (MMR). India has registered remarkable progress on both fronts over the last decade. IMR has declined 28% from 58 in 2004 to 42 in 2012. MMR has come down 36% from 280 in 2005 to 178 in 2012. The decline has been more spectacular in some...

-The Economic Times In January 2012, PM Manmohan Singh declared half of India's children were malnourished and that was a national shame. Yet since then, not a single comprehensive national survey was conducted to determine the acuteness of the problem or measure progress, if any, of steps initiated to address malnutrition. Worse, the issue figures in a token manner in the election discourse of political parties and candidates. The 2005-06 National...