-HealthIndia.com To improve the rural health scenario the government intends to introduce the Bachelor of Rural Healthcare course (BRHC), which will require all medical students to work in rural areas for a period of time. This will see a change in the Postgraduate Medical education guidelines, which will include a 50% reservation quota for medical officers in government service. Also as an added incentive, there will be a 10% increase in...

The metropolis could have had five new police stations had the government accepted the recommendation of a committee on VIP security cover. A high-ranking IPS officer told TOI on Friday that the committee had recommended the reduction or withdrawal of the security cover of leading politicians. "But shockingly , chief minister Prithviraj Chavan and home minister R R Patil have rejected the recommendation for obvious political reasons," he said. Ironically, the...

Money from the Department for International Development has helped pay for a controversial programme that has led to miscarriages and even deaths after botched operations Tens of millions of pounds of UK aid money have been spent on a programme that has forcibly sterilised Indian women and men, the Observer has learned. Many have died as a result of botched operations, while others have been left bleeding and in agony. A...

Progressive strengthening of public facilities is the only way to reach medical services to the population as a whole. “The best form of providing health protection would be to change the economic system which produces ill health, and to liquidate ignorance, poverty and unemployment. The practice of each individual purchasing his own medical care does not work. It is unjust, inefficient, wasteful and completely outmoded ... In our highly geared, modern...

HINDIYANKALAN, India – One afternoon last November, 10 people in this eastern Indian village sat in a circle on a dirt road and told us about their fight against hunger. We wanted to know: What would drive a person to eat a poisoned root? I was on a research assignment with my colleague Ankita Aggarwal from the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi think tank. It was part of a...