-Hindustan Times It’s a paradoxical fact. Families become smaller as better nutrition, vaccination and healthcare ensure couples lose fewer children to malnutrition and infections, such as diarrhoea, pneumonia, sepsis and tuberculosis India’s most comprehensive report card on health released earlier this year shows India’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped from an average of 2.7 children per women in 2006 to 2.2 a decade later. Around two in three states that are...

-GovernanceNow.com The cost of maintaining our 5.3 million stray cattle comes to about Rs 30,115 core per year A lot of debate that we witness in the media on the cattle question these days suffer from the disease of speculative utopian imagination of a ‘cow-nation’ and relentless abuses for those beef-eating ‘others’.   Political debates over the question of our bovine stock has mostly been heavily polarising and mindlessly simplistic, notwithstanding exceptions like veteran...

-The Indian Express Four years after the tragedy, The Indian Express visited at least 15 disaster-hit villages and towns near Kedarnath, where a majority of the population lives under severe psychological trauma. What makes it worse is the near breakdown of the state’s mental health infrastructure. Kalimath Valley (Gaurikund): On June 12, the search for 23-year-old Prahlad Singh ended. Villagers found him tightening a rope around his neck. “He was about to...

-TheWire.in While suicides and shock deaths have seen a sudden spike in Tamil Nadu’s Cauvery delta region, the government does not believe the drought is the cause and is continuing to direct water away from rural areas. From the banks of the Kollidam river, S. Selvaraju’s farm is barely a mile away. The huge river, actually a tributary of the Cauvery that drains its surplus water into the sea, runs along the village...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: For every 100 hospitalised pediatric patients across India who may need a common antibiotic called ampicillin to fight infections, chances are it won't help 95 of them. In 75% of hospitalised children, especially those younger than one month old, another common antibiotic, gentamycin, may not work. The reason, according a recent study by pediatricians of Apollo Hospital in Navi Mumbai, is that antibiotic resistance has risen to...