The goal of universal health care requires an overhaul of the public health system, medical education and regulatory mechanisms. At long last, public health is on the agenda of the country’s policy makers. The Prime Minister’s Republic Day speech mentioned that the Twelfth Plan would focus on health just as the Eleventh Plan had focussed on education. But the manner in which the education sector has been messed with does not...

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...

Regulations covering public health should override personal rights and the country cannot wait any more for a good public health law. The health care industry, including institutions of medical education, hospitals and pharmaceutical businesses, have grown into behemoths that can do considerable harm in the absence of independent and effective regulatory systems. While there are no success stories in the regulation of any kind of industry in India, I will focus...

-PTI Every four minutes, one person takes his own life in this country and one in every five suicides is that of a housewife. This and other startling figures are part of a government report 'Accidental Deaths and Sucides in India 2011' released here recently. According to the report, the number of suicides have increased in 2011 by 0.7% to touch 1,35,585 compared to 1,34,599 in the previous year. West Bengal has reported the...

Only a handful of candidates from the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category have managed to get a seat or an institute of their choice in the open category this year. A majority had to use reservation or relaxed score to get into the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). According to the IITs, of the 4,805 OBC candidates who cracked the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) this year, 1,625 candidates had figured in...