-Agence-France Presse Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has said that the country's public Health System had "collapsed" in a blunt assessment of his government's failure to extend a social safety net for the poor. Mr Ramesh, known as a maverick with often outspoken views, stressed that 70 per cent of spending on health was out of people's own pockets, making it the single most important reason for indebtedness in rural areas. "We all...
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From plastic portable loos to Sanitary Bonds, India needs a latrine policy-V Raghunathan
-The Economic Times After Mahatma Gandhi, Jairam Ramesh is the only national leader to be genuinely concerned that 65 years after Independence, some 600 million Indians in the 21st century continue to use open skies as their latrines. While Lee Kuan Yew continues to exhort Singaporeans to have cleaner loos, our ministry of railways thinks depositing human excreta all along the country's length and breadth, including deep into the cities -...
More »Combating a killer-Dr. PK Rajagopalan
-Frontline There are no effective vaccines against Japanese encephalitis, but its spread can be controlled in India through vector management. JAPANESE ENCEPHALITIS, or JE, has become endemic in many parts of the country, occurring repeatedly in epidemic form in many of them—for instance, in parts of Gorakhpur in northern Uttar Pradesh. One can expect JE-type epidemics year after year in States where prolonged drought-like conditions are followed by heavy monsoons. This leads to...
More »Big cities are gasping for fresh air; air pollution worsens in metros-Shelley Singh
-The Economic Times Along with your tablet, smartphone and car keys, get ready to pack a gas mask. And if you thought the recent smog in Delhi and the more-than-usual pollution levels (20% higher) in the last fortnight were due to the burning of residual crop in Punjab and Haryana, you are wrong. After a steady improvement since the late-1990 s, the air in Delhi — and all other Indian cities —...
More »Pneumonia No. 1 killer of children under 5: Report
-The Indian Express Pneumonia continues to be the leading cause of deaths among children under five years of age in India. According to the Pneumonia Progress Report 2012 brought out by the International Vaccine Access Centre and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in 2010, India recorded the highest under-five mortality from the dreaded disease. Though in the period 2000-10, the overall child mortality dipped from 9.6 million to 7.6...
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