Free healthcare at state-of-the-art hospitals will soon be within reach of even those with meagre resources. The Jharkhand chapter of National Rural Health Mission is mulling a massive tie up with public sector units to provide free medical care to over 25 lakh people of the state who are living below the poverty line. State mission director Aradhana Patnaik, confirming the development, informed that major PSUs operating out of Jharkhand, including CCL,...

Rajasthan has failed its girl children on two counts. Not only has it failed to protect them, it has also been unsuccessful in educating them, according to the Census figures released on Monday. The child sex ratio (number of females for every 1,000 male children in 0-6 age group) has dropped sharply to 883 from 909 in 2001 and the state reports the lowest female literacy rate at 52.66%. Expressing concern...

The battle against poverty and inequity can be won only if governments focus on the welfare of adolescents, says a UNICEF report. FINALLY, it has been recognised that adolescents constitute a very critical category in the overall battle against poverty and inequity. It is for this reason that the United Nations Children's Fund's (UNICEF) flagship report, “The State of the World's Children 2011”, focusses exclusively on adolescents and cautions against neglecting...

Number of centres to be frozen There are nearly 2,300 PHCs in the State Freezing the number will help improve the PHCs Ten of the 30 districts in the State have very poor healthcare services while an equal number of districts have good facilities. Given the need to streamline the system, the State Government has decided to freeze the number of Primary Health Centres (PHCs) and utilise the available funds for improving the...

Call it the curse of development. Kerala seems set to experience negative rate of growth of population, much like developed Europe and Japan in the recent decades, trends visible from the provisional results of Census 2011 suggest. The state recorded its slowest decadal increase in population of 4.8% between 2001 and 2011, or a compounded average annual growth rate of 0.48%. In contrast, the population of the country as a whole...