-The Indian Express Public and private efforts must converge to battle it. With two decades of high economic growth, India should have been on its way to controlling tuberculosis. Yet it remains an urgent public health problem. With 1,000 Indians dying every day of TB, and with the highest number of TB patients in the world, India is undoubtedly the crucial battleground for TB control. The enhanced detection of drug-resistant TB has...

A new report entitled Improving Access to Finance for Women-owned Businesses in India (2014), jointly produced by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Government of Japan, underlines the importance of lending to women-owned micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs)* in India (see the link below). It discusses the problem of accessing finance faced by women entrepreneurs despite them having stronger repayment track records vis-à-vis men (non-performing loans are 30 to...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's health ministry will tomorrow release the country's first-ever rulebook on tuberculosis that medical experts hope will help curb wrong treatment in the private sector and improve results in public-sector clinics. The Standards for TB Care in India (STCI) prescribe ways to diagnose and treat the disease, a bacterial infection that requires multiple drugs to be administered for at least six months - and up to two years...

-The United Nations To mark World Water Day, the United Nations is highlighting the key role that water and energy play in economic development and the eradication of poverty worldwide, and calling for strong measures to ensure their efficient and equitable use. In his message for the Day, focused this year on the interdependence between the management of water and energy, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted that "they interact with each other...

-Financial Chronicle India's independence in 1947 had the great Bengal famine as its backdrop. During the Bengal famine of 1942-43, over three million children, women and men died of starvation. India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, therefore, said in 1947, "Everything else can wait; but not agriculture". This commitment led to the initiation of several programmes in the field of agriculture, such as extension of irrigation facilities, establishment of seed corporations,...