-Civil Society Nalgonda (Telangana): Mamatha arrived at the Nalgonda District Hospital atop the fuel tank of her uncle’s motorcycle. She weighed just 650 grammes. She had been wrapped in a small sheet of cellophane and put in some kind of a folder. Her mother at that time was fighting for her own life after the premature delivery in the 28th week of her pregnancy. She had high blood pressure and was bleeding. The...

-TheWire.in The shift from the MDGs to sustainable development goals is also a shift from tracking aggregates to tracking more disaggregated indicators, and India urgently needs a strategy to overcome data limitations. India may be one of the very few countries where key central ministries disagree on whether crucial Millennium Development Goals (MDG) will be achieved or not. MDG 5, whose target was reduction of maternal mortality ratio (MMR) by three quarters...

-Livemint.com This preference for spending on religious services than sanitation extends across income and spatial divides Cleanliness is next to godliness—or so we are told. In India, cleanliness actually ranks several notches below godliness on the priority list. A recent report by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) shows that Indians are willing to spend more on religious services than on sanitation, irrespective of spatial and income divide. The survey, findings of which...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Free Health-care services during childbirth remain a pipe dream for most of India's poor, whether it relates to diagnostic tests, medicines, transport or even food, despite the Union Health ministry launching a "free entitlements" programme five years ago. The families of most women who seek childbirth in government hospitals are forced to pay for supposedly "free" services, at times experiencing catastrophic expenditures likely to accentuate their poverty, two...

-Livemint.com Economist Joseph Stiglitz says govt clampdown on NGOs such as Greenpeace and Ford Foundation and the JNU row shine a poor light on India globally Bengaluru: Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has a blunt message for Prime Minster Narendra Modi: India has an image problem after the government’s clampdown on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and its actions against students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). “Some issues have got a lot of public...