The shortage of doctors and paramedical staff for the country's poor and downtrodden is assuming alarming proportions. According to the latest data on rural health statistics, a huge number of posts sanctioned for medical staff in primary and community health centers have been lying vacant. Consider the case of primary health centres. The vacancies stack up to 5,224 doctors, 7,243 health care workers and 1701 health assistants, respectively. The situation...

Every year, India adds the population of Australia to its already staggering ranks of 116.1 crore people. Every 10 years, we add the population of Brazil — the fifth most populous country in the world. As yet another World Population Day comes around on July 11, and India stands poised to eclipse China as the most populous country of the world, the government is gingerly attempting to bring incentive-based family planning...

Wazirpur, the North Delhi village that recently witnessed three suspected honour killings, is only a stone’s throw away from a big, flashy glass-and-steel mall in the middle-class neighbourhood of Ashok Vihar. But, given the extreme brutality of the recent case, it may as well be a million miles away. Like most urban villages in the Capital, Wazirpur’s economy was at one point completely dependent on agriculture. In 1950, as the...

His right thumb severed, Santosh Mondal didn’t know how he would harvest his crop. So he killed himself last night. The tragedy mirrors the desperation of not only a poor Murshidabad farmer but also of a state where politics revolves around farming even if it does not make economic sense. The suicide over a digit that most take for granted becomes all the more stark against the backdrop that Santosh could have...

Sixty per cent of hospitals in rural Maharashtra don’t have an obstetrician or gynaecologist, 85 per cent are not equipped to conduct caesarean sections and about 90 per cent don’t have blood storage facilities. These are just some of the several shocking findings of the third District Level Household Survey (DLHS), a health survey commissioned by the Union Health Ministry and conducted by the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai....