The Janani Suraksha Yojana, a path-breaking conditional cash transfer initiative launched in 2005 to encourage deliveries at government health care facilities, has achieved some of its goals. It was launched at a time when India accounted for 20 per cent of maternal and 31 per cent of neonatal deaths in the world. Benefits started accruing a year after the scheme came into operation — the number of deliveries in government...

Why is Madhya Pradesh ranked so low in the Millennium Development Goals like child and Maternal mortality, extreme poverty, hunger and safe drinking water? Social sector allocation has increased only during the last few years. Before 2005, there wasn’t enough money allocated to it when compared to poverty alleviation schemes. Also, it takes time for the benefits of the allocations to reach people and for real change to manifest itself....

At the beginning of this millennium in year 2000, 189 countries and 23 international health agencies had pledged to reduce child under-5 mortality by two-thirds and Maternal mortality by three-fourths by 2015. These were called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) number 4 and 5. With only five years left for the target year, a clutch of international health agencies and NGOs have come out with ‘‘Countdown to 2015 — Decade...

The word ‘Mitanin’ was derived from a Chhattisgarhi custom, where a ‘mitanin’ is a girl bonded ceremoniously in her childhood to another girl as a lifelong friend IT IS quite common for tractors in rural India to haul all kinds of unusual cargo. Even then, a late night emergency shuttle, from a small home in Narayanpaal village in the backward Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, to ferry a pregnant woman in...

Here's good news for pregnant women in Madhya Pradesh's rural areas. A free service to take them to a hospital for delivery is set to be extended to all 50 districts of the state that has a high Maternal mortality ratio. The 24 x 7 call centres under the Janani Express - the ambulance service for pregnant women - are currently available only in 10 districts. "We are extending the services to...