-The Times of India Rural positing for six months will soon become compulsory for undergraduate medical students before they get their MBBS degree with the Medical Council of India (MCI) recently presenting the proposal to the health ministry. At present, an MBBS course of 5.5 years includes one year of internship. However, most of these medical students end up practising in urban settings, refusing to serve the country's rural population. The MCI has...

-The Hindu A 2012 WHO study ranks India third — behind Myanmar and Bangladesh — among countries that fail to provide health cover to people. A 2011 study reported in The Lancet on ‘Healthcare and equity’ confirms this: every year, at least 39 million people here fall into poverty due to private out-of-pocket health expenditure. A vast majority of Indians do not have access to healthcare or essential drugs. By the...

-The Telegraph The Supreme Court has struck down the grace marks of up to 30 per cent given to rurally posted government doctors in admissions to postgraduate medical degree courses in Odisha. Its verdict yesterday set aside an Orissa High Court order that upheld the grace marks — 10 per cent per completed year of rural service up to three years — given in the state, and therefore applies only to Odisha. But...

A cure for India’s health care ills is within reach provided there is political will In most developed — and many developing — countries today, a 12-year school education and universal health coverage (UHC) are the two primary responsibilities of the state. India has failed miserably on both counts. Let us look at some of the problems of medical and health care: • Fifty years ago, when there was no commercialisation of...

Census 2011 data bring into the open Maharashtra’s terrible record in sex-selective abortions. In early June, Vijaymala Patekar, a mother of four girls, haemorrhaged to death at a hospital in Parli, Beed district, Maharashtra. She was reportedly in her second trimester of pregnancy. Her family had allegedly forced her to abort the foetus when they learnt it was a girl child. Sudam Munde, the doctor who performed the procedure, fled Parli but...