Child mortality great barometer of economic progress ‘Prioritise the marginalised to curb mortality' Children from the poorest communities are three times more likely to die before they reach the age of 5 than those from high income groups, Save the Children, a non-governmental organisation has said. In a global report titled A Fair Chance at Life, the organisation said the policy to lower child mortality in India and elsewhere appeared to focus on...

The state health department has sought additional 7.6 lakh capsules and syrup of oseltamivir (popularly known as Tamiflu) from the Union government for distribution to rural areas of the state. The fresh demand for oseltamivir, the only prescribed drug to treat swine flu, was triggered by reports of more cases of infection and deaths in rural parts of Maharashtra since the onset of monsoon this year. The department has demanded...

Young rag-pickers sifting through rubbish are a common image of India’s chronic poverty, but destitute children face new hazards picking apart old computers as part of the growing “e-waste” industry. Asif, aged seven, spends his days dismantling electronic equipment in a tiny, dimly-lit unit in east Delhi along with six other boys. “My work is to pick out these small black boxes,” he said, fingers deftly prising out integrated circuits from the...

For the preparation of the Commonwealth Games 2010, around Rs 17,400 crore have been spent on Delhi by the government over the past three years. The over-used word deployed by public leaders and officials to describe the city, which they hope will emerge from these exertions, is ‘world-class’. But forgotten are the men and women whose toil will make this ‘world-class’ city possible. At its peak in 2008-09, an estimated...

For generations of China watchers, Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea was an objective interpreter of the tumultuous events which unfolded in the Peoples’ Republic.  Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea was one of the world’s leading scholars on China, a political scientist who skirted the minefield that her subject’s often fraught relations with India laid before her peers with integrity, wit and an objectivity of consideration rare in the field of Sinology. Taking to academia at...