India’s largest association of doctors and the country’s apex regulator of medical education appear poised for confrontation over a government proposal to create a new cadre of healthcare providers for rural areas. The Union health ministry has announced a plan to create a group of health practitioners who could diagnose and treat common illnesses and injuries and prescribe medicines to patients in rural areas plagued by shortages of doctors. The health ministry...

While a country like China devised practical ways to deliver healthcare to rural populations by deploying its band of ‘barefoot doctors’ from the 1960s in a transitional phase, and then went on to expand full-fledged medical education facilities that enabled national coverage to a great degree, chronic shortages of doctors in rural India six decades after Independence remain a worry. The allopathic doctor-patient ratio is a dismal 1:1,722. Nevertheless, the...

Civil society organisations have demanded the speedy passage and implementation of the proposed National Health Bill, 2009, but with certain changes that ensure health as a universal entitlement to all sections of society. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, sought a National Health Act to ensure equitable distribution of medical facilities across the population. “The National Health Act should be on the lines of the Right to...

Activists realise it takes a fight to translate democracy from thin paper to thick action In the winter of 1997, advocate Ashok Agarwal filed a petition in the Supreme Court opposing the nearly 400 per cent hike in school fees. This was the year the Fifth Pay Commission recommendations were implemented and the salaries of teachers shot up. Parents trying to cope with the overall price rise were suddenly hit by...

The fraction of Scheduled Caste children enrolled in schools is dropping even though Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes are improving their presence in admission rosters, the government’s latest statistics show. The number of enrolled Scheduled Caste children for every hundred students has dropped for a second consecutive year, the statistics released today by the National University for Educational Planning and Administration revealed. The statistics were collected by the district information system...