-The Hindu ‘Cost of an inpatient episode is much higher in private sector’ Bulk of the total public money spent in State-level healthcare system is not spent on medical services, but goes to wages and salaries of human resource, reveals a study of health accounts of six States. Wages and salaries account for 86 per cent of the total public expenditure in Punjab, 72 per cent in Maharashtra, 65 per cent in Kerala,...

-Business Standard Scheme to benefit close to 450 million workers, mainly in the unorganised sector  Stung by repeated resistance from trade unions and strikes, the Narendra Modi government plans to launch a massive social security coverage scheme which will benefit almost 450 million workers, mainly in the unorganised sector. In order to achieve this, the government will attempt to create a corpus through which the benefits will be provided. The benefits include...

-The Hindu The State has taken the lead in providing some essential and basic health-care training to these informal providers. In West Bengal, nearly 3,000 quacks — informal health-care providers with no formal medical education — are to be trained for six months. The crash course in medicine, and to be conducted by 130 trained nurses, is to begin from December 1. The objective is to provide these informal providers with a minimum...

-The Hindu Recent years have been a watershed in the public health programme in India. We have managed to eradicate diseases such as polio and tetanus, reduced maternal and child mortality rates significantly, halved the prevalence of tuberculosis and malaria and increased the life expectancy for both adults and children. These achievements reflect the unflinching efforts of the Indian government and all stakeholders in the past two decades to ensure health...

-Hindustan Times Jaipur: Three-year-old Pawan of Dhaikheda village in Salumbder block of Udaipur district loves his new routine. He goes to a phulwari, a day-care centre, in Medifala under Bedawal gram panchayat every day at 9 am where he gets three meals, plays with toys as young tribal women from the area read out to him poems and stories. His two sisters had died of malnutrition. Pawan too was diagnosed with acute...