Jharkhand has decided to seriously monitor deaths of mothers, during child delivery or as a result of extraneous circumstances, having woken up to its dismal health record that is nowhere near the UN’s millennium goals. Jharkhand’s maternal mortality rate or MMR — the number of maternal deaths per one lakh live births in a year — stands at 371, while the national average is 312. But as a signatory to...

Drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) is now at record levels with Asia bearing the brunt of the epidemic, says the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) in a report released today that also calls for better diagnosis of the disease. In some parts of the world, one in four people with TB becomes ill with a form of the disease that can no longer be treated with standard drugs, according to WHO’s...

While more than 200 million slum dwellers worldwide have escaped their conditions in the past decade, the overall population of slums has swelled by nearly 60 million in the same period, a new United Nations report finds. Some 227 million people have moved out of slum conditions, largely due to slum upgrading, since 2000, more than double the target of improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers...

Why is India's most socially developed state - and one of the developing world's most advanced regions - an economic laggard? This question about Kerala, known all over the world for its lush landscapes, sun-drenched beaches and idyllic backwaters, has been a subject of intense debate among economists and social scientists. Kerala defies all stereotypes of a "socially backward" Indian state - swathes of people living in abject poverty, men outnumbering...

Once India sold poverty to foreigners; now it’s being asked to export its top anti-poverty scheme. Five foreign governments have asked the Centre to help them replicate the rural job scheme in their countries, officials have said. South Africa was the first to have shown interest in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), India’s “cushion for poor people’’ in the words of the World Bank. The other four too are African...