-The Telegraph New Delhi: An effort has begun to enrol India's street children in the Aadhaar programme, which will allow them in principle to obtain school admission, open bank accounts and secure government welfare. Some child rights activists, however, fear it will be a "cosmetic endeavour" in the absence of a government rehab programme, since few of these children have money to keep in banks or the resources to study. National Commission for...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A year after the Supreme Court pulled up 19 states, including Bengal, that did not have a commission to protect children's rights and directed them to set up one, most of these panels exist only on paper. All states/Union territories are required to have a child rights commission under Section 17 of the Commission for Protection of Child Rights Act, 2005. Twenty-three states now have the panels -...

-Frontline Childhood TB has been neglected for decades, but in the past few years the WHO has begun to realise its real impact in terms of incidence, prevalence and mortality. THE number of annual new tuberculosis (TB) cases in India has been nearly 2.2 million for the past couple of years. Many of these infected people would have been in contact with children aged under five years before being diagnosed and,...

-The Times of India CHENNAI: Thirteen-year-old Ramesh, a Class 8 student, ran away from his home in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district after his mother died. "My father used to beat me often. Unable to bear the torture, I ran away and reached Chennai at midnight and stayed on pavements for a while," said Ramesh (name changed). Later, an activist took him to an orphanage in Chennai. But not many are as...

-The Business Standard India has to come to terms with a growing obesity problem that is rapidly becoming a crisis Obesity, an epidemic often thought to be exclusive to wealthy countries, is becoming a rapidly growing crisis for India. The National Family Health Survey of 2006 revealed that roughly one in four urban Indians was overweight or obese, and several more recent studies indicate that these numbers are increasing. A new study...