Awards compensation of Rs.5 lakh for woman's death due to absence of medical officerEstablishing primary health centres (PHCs) in rural pockets and classifying them as 24- hour maternity hospitals will be of no use unless the government makes sure that doctors/medical officers are available there to attend to emergencies, the Madras High Court has said.Justice N. Paul Vasanthakumar made the observation while directing the Director of Primary Health Services to...

The state government has made a positive gesture by deciding to recruit doctors to fill up vacancies at government hospitals. But doctors are not willing to reciprocate. The government has decided to fill up 3,613 vacancies by March 2011 but only 1,200 doctors have applied for the posts in government hospitals across the state, said a source. Officials of Bihar Health Services Association (BHSA) — the organisation that represents doctors in...

The government today ordered an inquiry into the alleged irregularities in wage payments under NREGA in Kotda village in Gujarat's Kotiyana district. Rural Development Minister C P Joshi asked the National Level Monitor (NLM) to examine the alleged misappropriation of funds related to NREGA wage payments in Kotda village and submit a report by November 30. The direction came following media reports about an e-literate panwala in the village stumbling upon a...

Being obsessed with Google, a betel shop owner has exposed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) scam in Porbandar where most of the laborers mentioned in the list of beneficiaries were affluent NRIs, doctors in real life, who had never been a part of any job scheme. They have been shown as unemployed village labourers holding NREGA job cards, reports Hiral Dave of the Financial Express. The...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...