-The Hindu The State has taken the lead in providing some essential and basic health-care training to these informal providers. In West Bengal, nearly 3,000 quacks — informal health-care providers with no formal medical education — are to be trained for six months. The crash course in medicine, and to be conducted by 130 trained nurses, is to begin from December 1. The objective is to provide these informal providers with a minimum...

-Hindustan Times At least 9 homeless deaths are reported across Delhi every day. Most die of drug addiction. They die, unidentified across Delhi every year, and the numbers mount. In 2005, the number of unidentified bodies in Delhi was 2,202. In 2015, this figure rose to 3,285. In areas surrounding Kashmeri Gate, Old Delhi and Yamuna Bazar -- areas with most homeless -- the Delhi Police find at least five unidentified bodies every...

-The Hindu India must convert its young population to a competitive advantage, and nutrition and health are foundational to that outcome. The “Global Nutrition Report 2016” once again demonstrates India’s slow overall progress in addressing chronic malnutrition, manifest in stunting (low weight for age), wasting (low weight for height), micronutrient deficiencies and over-weight. Our track record in reducing the proportion of undernourished children over the past decade has been modest at best,...

-The Indian Express As efforts are made to make India open defecation free by 2019, the biggest stumbling block is not the lack of enough toilets, but the difficulty in convincing people to start using them. New Delhi: Despite freshly-constructed functioning toilets in their homes, a group of old men in a village in Daniyawan block, about 30 km southeast of Patna city, continued to go out in the fields to defecate....

-The Hindu A better approach to man-wildlife conflict management requires an integration of scientific evidence, animal behaviour, and landscape and socio-economic context The difference of views on the killing of wild animals between a former and a sitting Environment Minister of the ruling party — one in favour, the other against — has hit the front pages. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change recently permitted three States, Uttarakhand, Bihar, and...