The bidirectional relationship between economic development and health justifies greater investment in the health sector. The National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) has been described as one of the largest and most ambitious programmes to revive health care in the world and has many achievements to its credit. It seeks to provide universal access to health care, which is affordable, equitable, and of good quality. It has increased health finance, improved infrastructure...

Its facets include concentration of media ownership and the transformation of news into a commodity. THE last two decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation of India's ‘mediascape' – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the United States, to describe how visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. While there...

-The Economic Times   The latest forecast of the Met office suggesting a weakening of the south-west monsoon during the second half of the monsoon season is not cause for panic. It is the distribution of rainfall across space and time rather than the aggregate percentages that matter for the farm sector. The good news is that both the spatial and temporal distribution of rainfall has been satisfactory so far. A good reservoir...

Calcuttans tried many a trick to fight the discomfiture induced by rolling power cuts today but a doctor in a pitch-dark labour room had little else other than a pack of cotton to help a lady who had become a mother minutes ago. The young mother lay in the labour room bleeding for 30 minutes this morning as the doctor could not stitch the cut in the feeble light of candles...

It’s been raining “rights” in Indian policy for the last few years — education, work, food, service, healthcare, and much else. This “Diet Coke” approach to poverty reduction — the sweetness without the calories — was always dangerous because of unknown side effects. Commenting in 1790 on the consequences of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke said: “They have found their punishment in their success. Laws overturned, tribunals subverted, industry without...