-The Telegraph   Bengal is the only state in India where maternal mortality rate has increased over a recent three-year period, although it is close to achieving key millennium development goal targets, indicating human and social development, for 2015. The findings of the latest nation-wide sample registration survey (SRS) shows that India’s maternal mortality rate (MMR), the number of women between 15 and 49 years dying from childbirth associated causes per 100,000...

Conditional cash transfers are necessary but not sufficient for improving health. Good government-funded health care is essential, as are schemes which address social determinants of health. The march of capitalism, with its reduced emphasis on public spending, while improving many national economies has also widened the gap between the rich and the poor. For millions of Indians, hunger is routine, malnutrition rife, employment insecure, health care expensive and livelihoods are under...

Health targets fail as they are set without strategies. The 12th Five-Year Plan should be used to look at the changes needed in the public health system. Health is currently a privilege in India. Not a right. Maternal and child health remains neglected even after countless plans, programmes and political proclamations. Every year, nearly 60,000 women die in pregnancy and childbirth, while approximately 1.7 million children less than five years of...

  Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...

-The United Nations   Up to 3.6 million deaths could be avoided each year in 58 developing countries if midwifery services are upgraded, according to a report released today by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and partners. The study, The State of the World’s Midwifery 2011, estimates that an additional 112,000 midwives need to be deployed in 38 countries to meet their target to achieve 95 per cent coverage of births...