-The Indian Express In Raipur hospitals, a joke doing the rounds these days is: “Soon, someone will file an RTI to know the number of uteruses left in Chhattisgarh.” What has prompted it is, however, no joke. If a series of media reports in the state is to be believed, the uteruses of thousands of women have been removed in unnecessary operations. These reports talk of doctors cheating BPL families by encouraging...

Universities should not have to bow to research institutes, writes Debashis Gangopadhyay. Basic Sciences versus Applied Sciences Undermining humanities studies in schools will lead to a large number of science graduates in the market. This is a boon for multinational companies as profits will escalate — the cost of labour being lower. However, the danger to profits persist from another aspect. Students who study science out of their love for a subject are...

-The Times of India DANTEWADA: Six-year-old Shiva Yadav sang softly to Shahid Khan, about two-and-half-years-old, trying to lull him to sleep. Their mothers — Vime Yadav and Kureshia Begum — were busy chopping vegetables for dinner of 250 children at Dantewada's Aastha hostel in south Chhattisgarh. Vime is a cook and Kureshia works as a peon at the state government-run Aastha. They landed the jobs after their husbands were killed in...

-Down to Earth   Punjab has been in the grip of cancer for over a decade but the government has ignored the threat.  It all started with a knot in her left breast. Within no time it grew to the size of a tennis ball. In pain, 40-year-old Raj Rani went to the doctor in her village in Punjab’s Ferozepur district. Finding no relief, she started doing the rounds of government hospitals in...

The Bill to regulate medical education and govern human resource in health is a highly diluted version of the original draft. Distortions in the area of Human Resource for Health (HRH) are the root cause of many of the ills facing the health sector in India. Among them is the shortage of qualified medical professionals. The estimated density of 19 health workers (qualified and unqualified) per 10,000 population is nearly 25...