Like the fight against poverty and hunger, the progress made by mankind against tuberculosis (TB) in the years up to 2019 has either slowed, stalled, or reversed, and global TB targets are off track due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Globally, although the reported number of people newly diagnosed with TB decreased from 7.1 million to 5.8 million between 2019 and 2020, the number went up to 6.4 million in 2021....

-Hindustan Times Union minister of state for health, Bharati Pravin Pawar, while presenting India’s national statement on combating AMR at the Third Global High-Level Ministerial Conference on Antimicrobial Resistance recently said that India was prioritising development and implementation of state action plans for containment of AMR across sectors India plans to strengthen its network of antimicrobial resistance surveillance labs that it set up to monitor the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) situation in the...

-Hindustan Times The World Bank should ensure “greater transparency and accountability” while factoring in subjective opinion-based indices as inputs for its World Governance Indicators (WGI) that has significant weightage in sovereign ratings, the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) said in a series of tweets citing an internal working paper, and called for independent Indian think tanks to bring out similar perception-based indices for the world in order to...

-The Telegraph Union government requests adjournment of hearing on a batch of petitions, Justice BV Nagarathna says ‘it’s very embarrassing for the court’ New Delhi: A five-judge constitution bench on Wednesday expressed displeasure over the Union government’s unparalleled request for adjourning the hearing on a batch of petitions challenging the demonetisation announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2016. “Normally, a constitution bench never adjourns like this. We never rise like this once...

-Livemint.com Just as much of today’s world is locked into fossil-fuel dependence, Indian farmers are in a trap of water-guzzling crop production that is not environmentally sustainable. The annual United Nations climate conference underway in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, has entire days devoted to two crucial sectors that directly impact the lives of millions in India: agriculture and water. At a time of stagnant incomes and groundwater depletion, we must enable farmers to...