-TheIndiaForum.in The worsening of poverty during the pandemic may well have led to a worrying spurt in marriages of girl children in India. The information available indicates that has happened, pushing back the progress of recent decades in reducing child marriages. The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted life for all groups in society. While attention has been focused on the direct effects of Covid-19 on hospitalisation and deaths, the ways in which it...

-Scroll.in What is needed is better public health communication. Along with an acute shortage of Covid-19 vaccines, with only 3.3% of its population fully vaccinated, India is also witnessing vaccine hesitancy. Anecdotal evidence suggests people, particularly in the rural and tribal areas, are not coming forward to take the vaccines. While it is imperative to address vaccine hesitancy, superficial attempts that fail to understand its structural causes could lead to more damage. As...

-The Indian Express Raising the diet of our people from subsistence level to higher levels of nourishment by overcoming the triple deficit is the only way to improve the nutritional indicators of our population — amongst children, adolescents and adults. It is nearly a month since the first phase of the NFHS-5 survey was published. While we await a response from the government or any policy-making authority, several articles by public health/policy...

Commenting on the recently released fifth round of National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data for 17 states and five Union Territories (UTs) in an article published in The Indian Express (dated 6th January, 2021), Arvind Subramanian and his co-authors have stated that India has made progress on certain outcomes, including infant mortality rate (IMR), under-five mortality rate (U5MR) and neonatal mortality rate (NNMR). Relying on various rounds of NFHS data,...

-TheWire.in According to the data, in most states there is a worsening in nutrition indicators such as childhood stunting, wasting and underweight. Partial results from the National Family Health Survey round 5 (NFHS-5) released last week draw attention to the crisis of malnutrition in the country. The factsheets that are available pertain to 17 states and five Union Territories – put together they roughly account for half of India’s population. Although there are...