-The Indian Express The CBI on Saturday carried out fresh searches across 23 locations in Uttar Pradesh in connection with the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) scam. The searches are being carried out across 12 districts including Lucknow, Kanpur, Varanasi, Meerut, Jhansi at the residences of health department officials of the state, who had held the posts of Chief Medical Officers (CMO) and Deputy CMOs, CBI sources said. The agency had yesterday registered...

-IANS   India has a reason to smile on the polio front, as it was taken off the list of polio endemic countries by the World Health Organisation (WHO), health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad announced at the Polio Summit 2012 held at Vigyan Bhawan on Saturday.  The summit had Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also in attendance.  "WHO has taken India's name off the list of polio endemic countries in view of the remarkable progress...

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has criticised UN agencies like the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) for not doing enough to fight hunger and poverty. “Countries, food agencies and donors aren’t working together in a focused and co-ordinated way to provide the help small farmers need, when they need it,” Gates told the governing council of the IFAD in...

Lax policemen made Jharkhand’s borders porous and helped child trafficking, a shocked National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) found on its second day of public hearing here today. In the cases that came to the commission for hearing, it was revealed that the police sat idle and deaf to frantic pleas of people whose minor children went missing. The members of the commission rebuked the state police for being...

While welcoming the report of the High Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage for India for its comprehensive vision and many well-conceived recommendations, this article focuses on the conditions needed for its promise to bear fruit. Towards this, it explores the political dimension, which comprises the forces and interests that come into play to shape and reconfigure administrative policy and its implementation.   We are grateful to Anand Zachariah and Susie...