-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In a move that will benefit over 27 crore children across the country, the health ministry has expanded its deworming programme to convert it into a national initiative seeking to cover as many as 536 districts over the next one year. The programme was earlier limited to 277 districts in 11 high-burden states, and covered nine crore children in 2015. The government has decided to ramp...
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How Sikkim could offer lessons to other states in organic farming -G Seetharaman
-The Times of India It's 8:00 am on a Sunday and outside Denzong Cinema in Gangtok's Lal Bazar, the otherwise languid atmosphere is punctured by grocers of two kinds. On one side of the cinema are those who sell vegetables, fruits and spices sourced from outside Sikkim, mostly from Siliguri, 115 km south in West Bengal. On the other side of the cinema, almost completing a triangle, are farmers from the...
More »On malaria, the government’s rhetoric must meet reality -Vivekananda Nemana & Ankita Rao
-The Hindu The Health Ministry’s plan for a malaria-free India by 2030 is laudable, but grand pronouncements are meaningless as long as manipulated data distort our knowledge and bad governance impedes genuine attempts to fight the disease This month, the Health Ministry will unveil an ambitious new plan to eliminate malaria from the country by 2030. A malaria-free India certainly sounds like a dream, or maybe an early campaign promise: the disease...
More »Nothing free or basic about it -Prabir Purkayastha
-The Hindu We need to provide full Internet at prices people can afford, not privilege private platforms. This is where India’s regulatory system has to step in The airwaves, the newspapers and even the online space are now saturated with a Rs. 100 crore campaign proclaiming that Internet connectivity for the Indian poor is a gift from Facebook which a few churlish net neutrality fundamentalists are opposing. In its campaign, Facebook is...
More »Smoking dips 10% in 2 years in India but women smokers up sharply -Rema Nagarajan & Atul Thakur
-The Times of India Cigarette consumption in India is falling steadily even as the number of women smokers is rising, making it home to the second largest number of female smokers after the United States. According to the latest data on cigarette consumption given by the health ministry in Parliament, the consumption in 2014-15 was 93.2 billion sticks — 10 billion less than in 2012-13. The production of cigarettes too fell from...
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