Just over five years ago, a global study had labelled India the world’s “lone polio exporter”, prompting the United Nations secretary-general to write a letter of concern to Manmohan Singh. Even three years ago, anti-polio workers in western Uttar Pradesh, then the disease’s epicentre in India, were often abused and driven away when they came to the villages for the vaccination programme. Such memories today flooded into the minds of doctors and...
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WHO takes India off polio endemic list: Ghulam Nabi Azad
-IANS India has a reason to smile on the polio front, as it was taken off the list of polio endemic countries by the World Health Organisation (WHO), health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad announced at the Polio Summit 2012 held at Vigyan Bhawan on Saturday. The summit had Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also in attendance. "WHO has taken India's name off the list of polio endemic countries in view of the remarkable progress...
More »No Bundle Packs Here by Anuradha Raman
Farmer suicides are endemic, who knew? Chances are no one’s heard about Azad’s death in Bachlapur village though Lalitpur, where the Congress, the BSP and the SP are in a battle for votes, is only 15 km away. Farmer suicides aren’t an election plank and parties prefer trading corruption charges. Rahul Gandhi’s much-touted Bundelkhand development authority proposal remains just that. More than 500 committed suicide in the Bundelkhand region last...
More »The heroes of India's quest to wipe out polio
-AFP Later this month, India will be removed from a dwindling list of countries where polio is considered endemic, a huge achievement made possible by people like Madara, a 76-year-old street hawker. At a temporary immunisation camp in a slum in the northern district of Ghaziabad, 23 kilometres (14 miles) from New Delhi, he is busy at work shepherding boisterous children into queues. All around, social workers break open tiny bottles containing a...
More »Jairam Ramesh, Minister for Rural Development interviewed by Anil Padmanabhan & Elizabeth Roche
As minister for rural development, Jairam Ramesh oversees the largest spending in the social sector by the government. This includes the marquee Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) that was pioneered by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in 2006. The minister, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known for his forthrightness. In a typically candid interview to Mint on...
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