Within weeks of getting bail from the Supreme Court in connection with charges of sedition, human rights activist Binayak Sen has been made member of the Planning Commission's Steering Committee on Health, which will advise the panel on the Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2012-2017). Binayak Sen, who was released on bail from the Raipur jail last month, will, based on his experience of having worked as a paediatrician in Chhattisgarh's tribal belt,...
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Worrisome trend by TK Rajalakshmi
The CSR has declined in 27 States and Union Territories, recording an all-time low, while the adult sex ratio has improved, though slowly. WHEN the provisional data from Census 2011 were released on March 31, the worst fears of those working in the area of women and child development were confirmed. The horror of a declining child sex ratio (CSR), which first came to light in Census 2001, returned once again,...
More »Survey: 20 of 3,172 patients in Pune hospital carry superbug by Amruta Byatnal
NDM-1, a result of large scale misuse of antibiotics, says dean A recent survey in the Sassoon Hospital here showed that 20 out of 3,172 patients were carrying the superbug, NDM-1 gene. Sixty-six per cent of the patients also showed multidrug resistance. While it is not a cause for immediate worry, experts say, the high level of resistance to drugs could mean that soon there will be no antibiotics which can...
More »Pesticide will go-eventually by Raja Murthy
The lush green Indian state of Kerala, advertised in travel brochures as "God’s Own Country", is at the center of a continuing battle in the country to secure an early ban on the use of the pesticide endosulfan. The Kerala government and activists say the pesticide has caused 4,000 victims in the state, through cancer, crippled limbs and babies born with deformities; 496 related deaths have been officially recorded. No scientist,...
More »A toilet per second by Richard Mahapatra
Even at this rate India might fail to meet the millennium development goal on sanitation In April last year when a UN report said more Indians had mobile phones than toilets, it pointed to a major miss in the millennium development goal on access to sanitation in the country. The message was clear at the South Asian Conference on Sanitation (SACOSAN), the highest inter-governmental forum to discuss sanitation in the subcontinent,...
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