-The Hindu The belt-tightening requires the poor to pay increased indirect taxes while the cushion of the social sector is consistently taken away from them. There is always a hype around a Union Budget but this time around, the expectations were running sky-high in terms of it being the make-or-break Budget for the Narendra Modi-led government since it happens to be in the middle of his five-year term. I must say at...

-The Hindu India has close to 1,00,000 cases of drug-resistant TB, most of which remain undiagnosed and untreated. So India’s state of preparedness to fight DR TB remains questionable. In a small, airless room in Dharavi, Owais sat chatting with his wife and two children. Outside, the famous rains of Mumbai beat down relentlessly on the thousands of tiny rooms that dot Dharavi. “I hope it doesn’t flood,” said Owais’s wife as he...

-The Hindu The Health Ministry’s plan for a malaria-free India by 2030 is laudable, but grand pronouncements are meaningless as long as manipulated data distort our knowledge and bad governance impedes genuine attempts to fight the disease This month, the Health Ministry will unveil an ambitious new plan to eliminate malaria from the country by 2030. A malaria-free India certainly sounds like a dream, or maybe an early campaign promise: the disease...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Doctors have expressed surprise at Union minister Maneka Gandhi's idea of mandatory prenatal sex disclosure with some medics warning that such a move could lead to a steep increase in the abortions of female foetuses and legitimise a criminal practice. They say the idea to reveal the sex of an unborn foetus to every woman presumably to track any attempt to selectively abort female foetuses would provide couples...

-Economic and Political Weekly Health and nutrition indicators have improved, but remain unacceptably low. After a hiatus of a decade, we now have up-to-date information on the health and nutrition status of the population. Preliminary results for 13 states and two union territories of the much awaited National Family Health Survey–4 (NFHS–4) which was conducted in 2015–16—the first after NFHS–3 of 2005–06—have just been released. In a welcome development, NFHS–4, for the...