-The Business Standard Moving forward on sanitation will require big ideas National shame” is how most people, including some senior government functionaries, often refer to the pervasive practice of open defecation. Yet, the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), launched in 1991 with the noble objective of providing access to hygienic toilets for all by 2012, receives only scant attention from the government. The latest assessment indicates that as many as 22 states will...

India seems to have arrived at the threshold of polio eradication, but should it lower its guard? ON January 13, India achieved what had only two years ago seemed impossible in the immediate term. The country, which, given the epidemiological data in the new millennium, had come to be regarded by health experts around the world as one that would be the last to achieve freedom from polio (poliomyelitis), recorded no...

Civil rights groups blame packaged food supplied to anganwadis  Close on the heels of the damning hunger and malnutrition (HUNGaMA) report, which found 42 per cent children below age five across India underweight and 59 per cent children stunted,  comes another report on the state of nutrition among children in Karnataka state. Over 1.2 million children in the state in the age group of 0-6 years are malnourished and underweight, says a...

India records the highest number of child pneumonia deaths globally, but is among the only four of the 15 countries with the highest child pneumonia death toll that is yet to introduce the newest generation of pneumoccal vaccines. A Pneumonia progress report, 2011, released by the International Access Vaccine Centre ( IVAC) and John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health last week shows that India recorded 3.71 lakh child pneumonia deaths...

Concerned over the large number of child deaths due to measles every year, the Centre has launched a massive anti-measles vaccination drive. More than 13 crore children are expected to be covered under the Measles Catch-up Campaign, irrespective of their previous measles vaccination status. The drive has been launched by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, with support from the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD), for carrying out the...