-The Hindu Even villages with higher toilet coverage, and households that had some family members using the toilet did not see any difference in health Is building toilets improving health in India? New evidence has raised troubling questions about India's 25-year strategy of pushing people to use toilets as a way to improve health. In a paper published on Friday morning in the medical journal Lancet, researchers led by Thomas Clasen of the U.S.-based...
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Ensuring a healthy start to life -Zakiya Kurrien
-The Hindu The first 1,000 days of life, between a woman's pregnancy and her child's second birthday, are critical for influencing lifelong health and intellectual development of the child The Human Development Report (HDR) released in July 2014 made an important revelation: that India continues to be positioned at 135 in the ranking of 187 countries based on the Human Development Index, and has not moved from where it was positioned the...
More »Where Do They Squat? -Santosh Mehrotra
-Outlook Build toilets. But more important, get communities to change ways. Vidya Balan, the Bollywood star and ambassador of the Indian government's programme for building household toilets, asks the mother-in-law who is busy toying with her bahu's ghunghat at the wedding ceremony: "Do you have a toilet at home for the daughter-in-law to use?" Mum-in-law replies: "No." Vidya then asks her, "Then why are you extending her ghunghat so much when you...
More »46% of South Asian girls marry by 18: Unicef
-AP United Nations: The highest rate of child marriage was in Bangladesh, where two-thirds of girls are married before age 18, followed by India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Nearly half of girls in South Asia marry before their 18th birthday as children in the region continue paying the price of persistent inequality, according to a Unicef report released on Thursday. The Unicef report said that child marriage is pervasive in South Asia even though...
More »Why India’s Children Have A Healthy Future -Prachi Salve
-IndiaSpend.com Is India winning the battle against malnutrition? A comprehensive answer, for several reasons, would be yes. First, there is a downstream impact of economic growth and reduction in overall poverty numbers, most of which has happened in the last decade. Second, it does appear that in many states of India, concerted and co-ordinated efforts by the Government are beginning to bear fruit. Also remember that most data on malnutrition goes back a...
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