-The Hindu Much of the National Health Policy document reads like a report of health issues and systemic challenges, and is sorely wanting on policy detail Health impoverishment - falling into poverty due to health care costs - affects 63 million individuals in India every year. This is a damning statistic, especially when read with the fact that 18 per cent of all households face catastrophic health expenditures (health expenditure greater than...

-The New York Times NEW DELHI: Her first child survived eight months before succumbing to pneumonia; her second was stillborn; her third, delivered in a rickshaw, gasped for an hour before dying. When she got pregnant for a fourth time, Juhi, a woman from a South Delhi slum who uses only one name, was spotted by a local health worker and taken to a mobile clinic. A doctor diagnosed severe anemia, gave...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: After two decades of practising gynaecology, Arun Gadre decided to turn whistleblower and seek out others like him who could articulate what he says are disturbing practices in India's healthcare system that hurt patients. Gadre, while running a private clinic in Lasalgaon in western Maharashtra, had seen women prescribed hysterectomies without justification, women coaxed into opting for Caesarean sections when normal deliveries may have been possible, patients prescribed...

-The Hindu Business Line   There's no Malthusian problem right now, but without sustainable farming the world will be in serious trouble Food security, a seemingly innocuous phrase, is fast becoming one of the most widely discussed topics of our time. A lot of us would associate ‘food security' as a challenge for the impoverished but it could potentially become a much more widespread problem straddling across geographic and economic divides. The issue of...

-The New Indian Express   BALANGIR: The ongoing socio-economic survey to prepare the beneficiary list for the National Food Security Act (NFSA) is scheduled to be completed next month. The process, though, is going to leave out lakhs of migrants from Western Odisha districts, Balangir in particular, who will not be able to enrol themselves. This is because the seasonal migration cycle, which begins from September to June will deny the migrants a...