While reliable data on health workers in India is difficult to obtain, a report in The Lancet: India series says that the country has roughly 20 health workers per 10,000 population. The figure is arrived at when the workforce is calculated including allopathic doctors (31%), nurses and midwives (30%), pharmacists (11%), practitioners of ayurveda, yoga and naturopathy, unani, siddha, and homoeopathy (9%), and others (9%). In their paper ‘Human Resources for Health...

A number of questions on the Unique Identification (UID) project continue to remain unanswered while the project itself is necessitated by the government's policy shift to play an indirect rather than direct role in providing services, a panel of researchers told journalists on the sidelines of a public talk on the subject at St. Xavier's College here on Saturday. Usha Ramanathan, researcher on jurisprudence, poverty and rights, said it was not...

Everyone agrees that there is a food crisis. As ordinary members of the public we know there’s one every time we go out shopping for vegetables. My mother knows there’s a crisis because, after recently sacking her cook, she discovered the lady had left with all the onions in the house. The media agrees there’s one, and sends more TV crews to talk to onion farmers, even though the TV reporters...

Activists and researchers today raised doubts over security of data being collected for the Unique Identification (UID)project and its public utility. "The personal information being collected for the UID would be stored in a central database system without assuring protection against data theft. There could be a possibility of profiling, tracking and surveillance with the help of the information," Usha Ramanathan, an independent law researcher said today at a press conference. There...

A week after he lost his ailing son, and ten months after he worked on a village road project, Pitbasu Bhoi finally got the ten thousand rupees he had earned under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Program (MNREGA). "Of what use is the money now? I have just immersed my son's ashes. When I needed the money to save his life, I did not have it," says Bhoi. The...