Even as recent media reports caution that most fruits and vegetables are largely unfit for human consumption due to their high chemical content, pesticides continue to be used recklessly in the fields of Punjab. The ‘Granary of India’ constitutes 2.5 per cent of the total agricultural land in India, but consumes more than 18 per cent of the total pesticides used in India. Within the state the worst affected is the southwestern...

HIV prevalence in India and South Asia is growing among sex workers and other high risk groups due to widespread failure to prevent stigmatising of people living with AIDS, according to a new report. Despite prevention and other efforts to reduce high-risk behaviours such as unprotected sex, buying and selling of sex, and injecting drug use, HIV vulnerability and risk remain high, says the report by a team from the...

Sujatha Sundaran, 25, sits on a rickety bench and points to a rubber nursery that was a helipad about a decade ago in Mundakkai colony in the heart of Kerala’s northern district of Kasargod. Local children used to watch with awe as the choppers flew overhead and sprayed the insecticide endosulfan on the cashew groves of the Plantation Corp. of Kerala Ltd, a state government undertaking. She was eight when she...

Regular helpings of fruit are a dietary given, but increasing use of harmful chemicals for artificially ripening has often left buyers helpless. The Union health ministry has now stepped in, deciding to punish guilty vendors with up to six months in jail and fine of Rs 1,000. Vendors often resort to use of chemicals such as calcium carbide to ripen fruits, specially mangoes, bananas, papayas, apples and plums before time....

Counting the “invisible” children of Mother India.  While the current focus of political debate is on ‘caste and census,' there is another important aspect that deserves attention. This concerns disability. For decades after our independence, there was no effort to actually count how many of us have any disability. There were estimates- informed or otherwise- but no factual figures. All our government's plans and budgets, rules and regulations, proclamations and posturing...