The jingle of 'healthy Haryana' is losing sheen. As per data released by the Haryana Aids Control Society, people suffering from STD, including women, who tested positive for HIV are largely from Bhiwani, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Jhajjar and Ambala districts. People are falling prey to the HIV largely due to drug addiction, multiple use of needles and sexually transmitted disease (STD) infection. However, more cases of HIV positive due to multiple use of...

It was a warm summer’s morning last week in teeming old Faridabad, a chaotic, industrial town where nearly half the people live in slums. Praveen Kumar was talking to students at a government girls’ senior secondary school. They complained about the broken fans, and they told him how there was just one sweeper to clean the stinky toilet. A lean, graying man with a receding hairline and neatly trimmed moustache, 51-year-old...

The story of national shame continues for the second decade in a row for Haryana. Provisional census figures for 2011 show the districts of Jhajjar and Mahendergarh have the lowest child sex ratio in the country. There are 18.02 lakh boys under the age of 6 in Haryana; the number of girls in the same age group is 14.95 lakh. Though the overall child sex ratio has shown an improvement from...

Adding just 30 lakh people in the last 10 years, Delhi experienced its slowest population growth in almost a century. The decadal growth rate of 21% was less than half the figure of 47% for the previous decade. Census officials attributed this to a combination of declining fertility and mass slum demolitions. Provisional district-level data released by Varsha Joshi, director of census operations for NCT, on Monday said this is the...

The sex ratio in Haryana has dipped again in 2010 after encouraging signs of reversal in 2009, showing that female foeticide is still prevailing across the state. The health department figures for last year show a negative trend in 17 districts in the 0-6 age group. The disclosure has forced the government to do a rethink on policies being framed to arrest the slide. According to figures available till 2010-end,...