-Livemint.com World Bank data shows that the number of hospital beds per thousand people in India is much lower than the world average New Delhi: The deaths of two dengue-infected Delhi children after they were refused admission by hospitals (one private, one government) has led to yet another slugfest between the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Leaving mud-slinging aside, the irony is difficult to miss. India,...

-Business Standard The lens with which we report India's farm crisis has to change As we head for another year of trouble in the countryside, it is time to discard the enduring media tropes of rural distress. Like the image of a grizzled Indian farmer, framed against his parched field looking up at an unrelenting sky. Or the all too pervasive conflation of rural distress with farmer suicides. Such characterisation offers the...

-The Indian Express The objective of the DNA Profiling Bill, 2015, is to establish a regulatory framework for DNA testing, and setting standards and guidelines for laboratories doing these tests. The proposed Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2015, could not be finalised in time to be introduced in Parliament’s Monsoon Session. After that, owing to the intense debate generated by the Bill in the past few weeks, the government extended the deadline...

-Business Standard Wants the draft National Health Policy revised yet again to include its ideas The NITI Aayog has objected to increasing investments and focusing on the public health sector as well as providing free drugs and diagnostics, as suggested in the updated draft National Health Policy of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. Asking for a revision, it has recommended that the private sector and insurance-based models be given a greater role...

-Economic and Political Weekly While insufficient sanitation facilities often get represented in statistics and are reported in the literature on urban infrastructure planning and contested urban spaces, what is often left out is the everyday practice and experience of going to dysfunctional toilets, particularly by women. By analysing the practices and problems associated with toilet use from a phenomenological perspective, this article aims to situate the issue in the everyday lives...