Over the past three years, the number of attacks on schools has seen a steep rise. The argument advanced by the Naxals is that schools have become police stations and security forces take cover here. To substantiate their claim they have never attacked a school when children were in it and attacks have always taken place when the school premises were closed. Security personnel who battle the Naxals however claim that...

Complexity and unsolved problems are at the very heart of the sustainability challenge, and at the very heart of M.S. Swaminathan's thinking and essays. In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus offered the piercing insight that geometric population growth would inevitably outstrip food production, leaving society destitute and hungry. Since that time, our optimism of beating the “Malthusian curse” has waxed and waned. Few people in modern history have done more to help...

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...

HIV prevalence in India and South Asia is growing among sex workers and other high risk groups due to widespread failure to prevent stigmatising of people living with AIDS, according to a new report. Despite prevention and other efforts to reduce high-risk behaviours such as unprotected sex, buying and selling of sex, and injecting drug use, HIV vulnerability and risk remain high, says the report by a team from the...

There is a huge shortage of human resource in the sector The Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry has set up a task force to frame the curriculum for the Bachelor of Rural Health Care course, which is expected to be rolled out in a few months. A new cadre of health care workers for rural India is expected to help in overcoming the huge shortage of human resource in the...