-The Hindu The Health Ministry’s plan for a malaria-free India by 2030 is laudable, but grand pronouncements are meaningless as long as manipulated data distort our knowledge and bad governance impedes genuine attempts to fight the disease This month, the Health Ministry will unveil an ambitious new plan to eliminate malaria from the country by 2030. A malaria-free India certainly sounds like a dream, or maybe an early campaign promise: the disease...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Only seven out of every 100 hundred teachers in colleges and universities across the country were from the Scheduled Castes last year. Those from the Scheduled Tribes were even worse off, numbering only 2 per cent. The grim statistics - included in a government report released last month -leap to relevance against the backdrop of the suicide of Rohit Vemula, the research scholar in the University of Hyderabad. Suggestions...

-Economic and Political Weekly Health and nutrition indicators have improved, but remain unacceptably low. After a hiatus of a decade, we now have up-to-date information on the health and nutrition status of the population. Preliminary results for 13 states and two union territories of the much awaited National Family Health Survey–4 (NFHS–4) which was conducted in 2015–16—the first after NFHS–3 of 2005–06—have just been released. In a welcome development, NFHS–4, for the...

-Livemint.com India needs to find better value for money in the health sector According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are three goals a country’s health system must aim for: to improve health, to be responsive to legitimate demands of the population and to ensure no one is at risk of serious financial losses because of ill health. Given this framework, the fourth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) released last week...

-Business Standard Four of the 6 large states have seen uptick in rural wages, following equally sharp increase in coverage of the rural employment guarantee scheme After months of stagnation, rural wages have started inching up, albeit marginally. Coinciding with a renewed push to the rural employment guarantee scheme in the second half of 2015, rural wages have shown a marginal uptick since August. It remained nearly flat from December 2014 to...