Sunita Laxman Jadhav is a door-to-door saleswoman who sells waiting. She sweeps along muddy village lanes in her nurse’s white sari, calling on newly married couples with an unblushing proposition: Wait two years before getting pregnant, and the government will thank you. It also will pay you. “I want to tell you about our honeymoon package,” began Ms. Jadhav, an auxiliary nurse, during a recent house call on a new bride in...

The shortage of doctors and paramedical staff for the country's poor and downtrodden is assuming alarming proportions. According to the latest data on rural health statistics, a huge number of posts sanctioned for medical staff in primary and community health centers have been lying vacant. Consider the case of primary health centres. The vacancies stack up to 5,224 doctors, 7,243 health care workers and 1701 health assistants, respectively. The situation...

More than 15,000 health sub-centres and 28,000 Nurses and midwives have been added in the rural health sector during the last five years, a health survey report says. According to the Rural Health Survey Report 2009, released by the Health Ministry Wednesday, a remarkable increase in human resource and infrastructure in the rural areas has been achieved since the launch of National Rural Health Mission (NHRM) in 2005. "Comparing the...

Why is Madhya Pradesh ranked so low in the Millennium Development Goals like child and maternal mortality, extreme poverty, hunger and safe drinking water? Social sector allocation has increased only during the last few years. Before 2005, there wasn’t enough money allocated to it when compared to poverty alleviation schemes. Also, it takes time for the benefits of the allocations to reach people and for real change to manifest itself....

At the beginning of this millennium in year 2000, 189 countries and 23 international health agencies had pledged to reduce child under-5 mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-fourths by 2015. These were called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) number 4 and 5. With only five years left for the target year, a clutch of international health agencies and NGOs have come out with ‘‘Countdown to 2015 — Decade...