In an indication that the ruling Congress may be looking to evolve a comprehensive social security package ahead of the next general election, the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) has started a consultative process with four central government ministries aimed at linking existing and new schemes for the huge unorganized sector. The plan, according to an NAC member, is to issue one entitlement card to every worker in the unorganized...

-PTI   The Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), an autonomous public private partnership project headed by the Prime Minister's cardiologist K Srinath Reddy, comes under the ambit of the RTI Act as it is substantial financed by the government, the CIC has held.  The PHFI came into existence in the year 2006 with an initial fund corpus of Rs 200 crore, in which government had contributed Rs 65 crore, the Central Information...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

1,727 persons have died during drug trials between 2007 and 2010, says public interest petition The Supreme Court of India has issued notices to the Centre and the Madhya Pradesh government in connection with clinical drug trials being conducted across India. This follows a public interest petition filed by an Indore based non-profit, seeking the court's intervention to put a stop to unethical clinical trials. Reports of unethical trials conducted on...

-PTI A team of doctors deputed by the union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has come up with a blueprint to curb TB cases in Mumbai, a top municipal official in Mumbai said. "The pilot project will be adopted across the country after it succeeds in Mumbai," additional municipal commissioner Manisha Mhaiskar said. The project, to be carried out under Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme, would be integrated with the basic public health...