-The Hindu The primary health-care system in India, intended to enable affordable health care, has not delivered on its promise. Rural, public health facilities are unable to attract, retain and ensure the regular presence of trained medical professionals. Health centres and hospitals in the public sector have proliferated but they are distributed inequitably. India may have one government hospital bed for every 1,833 people, but the reality is that while in...

Although there is sufficient data and evidence available in the public domain to argue whether there has been halving of poverty between 1990 and 2015, the same cannot be said with conviction about the halving of hunger—one of the targets set under the erstwhile Millennium Development Goals framework (replaced recently by SDGs). This is because the recently released data by the National Family Health Survey-4 (conducted in 2015-16) and the...

-The Hindu Bengaluru: With heightened concern over the impact of excessive use of technology — especially social media addiction — on mental health in our cities, the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) is planning to come up with an Urban Mental Health Plan. Revealing this at the 20th convocation of NIMHANS here on Saturday, institute Director B.N. Gangadhar said the current district mental health plan largely catered to issues...

-The Indian Express ICDS, the primary scheme targeting malnutrition, needs to be broadened with the help of the National Nutrition Mission. Every once in a while, a discussion or debate starts on malnutrition. On a debated issue, precision is desirable. Initially, there were several discussions on the word “malnutrition”, which can technically mean over-nutrition, as well as under-nutrition. But now, there is global consensus on three terms. First, for a given reference age,...

-The Times of India Unnao, a district in Uttar Pradesh, rarely hits headlines except when its rabble-rousing MP Sakshi Maharaj says something. Now, though, it is making news for all the right reasons, and aren't the women in the region tickled pink about it. From the district magistrate to the superintendent of police, the chief development officer to the chief medical officer, from the zila panchayat president to the sub-divisional magistrate,...