If some are still wondering why the census cannot blank out caste, their answer came bobbing in a country boat today. Bill Gates, who usually crosses continents on his $45-million private jet, took the boat that shuddered in the swift waters of the Kosi to reach a remote Bihar village that had hardly ever seen a district official. One of his first questions was if caste divisions in the country’s backward hinterland...

In a thrust to provide sustained support to life-saving innovations in India and around the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is placing new emphasis on innovations that effect social and cultural change to bring down the unacceptably high death rates for children under five years of age in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. “A lot of times,” Melinda French Gates, wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and co-founder of...

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have agreed to commit Rs 500 crore for the execution of health projects in selected districts of Bihar. The 'in principle' agreement towards this end was finalised during a daylong meeting here recently between State officials led by Principal Secretary (Health) C K Mishra and a visiting Gates Foundation team. The 11-member Foundation team, headed by Ashok Alexander, consented during the meeting to offer "co-operation...

Unauthorized medical practitioners find business where Bihar’s health machinery deserts Polio victims Two-year-old Khushi Kumari loves racing with her siblings and at the end of each run she gives out a hearty laugh. The only time she breaks into fits of inconsolable crying is when approached by a stranger. “She fears she would get injections again,” said her mother Dinapati Yadav of Haldichapra village in Patna district. “In September last year...

A new type of oral Polio vaccine will be introduced in the country tomorrow as part of the campaign to eradicate Polio, which has stubbornly resisted more than a decade of mass immunisation efforts based on orally administered vaccines. The bivalent vaccine is intended to immunise children against two types of wild Polio viruses -- P1 and P3 -- that have persisted in India. A third type of the wild...