The Centre has asked Dispur to take urgent steps to bring down Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) and Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) in the state. Sources said the Union health ministry had expressed concern over the key health indicators, IMR and MMR, which continue to worry the government despite the achievements made under the National Rural Health Mission. While the IMR is 58 per 1,000, the MMR in Assam is over 400...

Women in rural India continue to die because of indifference and neglect by healthcare authorities... This is a public health warning. Do not express concern for the state of healthcare in this country. Do not express anger that women die because they are either denied care or help is delayed when they have complicated pregnancies. Do not demand that healthcare is an entitlement that the poor have a right to demand...

NC Saxena , the influential former bureaucrat who is a member of the National Advisory Council, has raised the ineffectiveness of government programmes among tribal people in a paper that will come up for discussion before the Sonia-Gandhi headed council. The government relied on a report by Saxena last year in denying clearance to a large mining project by Vedanta Resources in Orissa’s Niyamgiri hills . This had attracted international...

A Bachelor of Rural Healthcare course is one of the proposed solutions: Azad Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare Ghulam Nabi Azad has called for “out of the box” solutions to reach out to remote areas so that health services can be provided there at the earliest. Speaking at a two-day national conference of State Health Ministers and Health Secretaries here on Wednesday, Mr. Azad said that in many remote areas...

In an unprecedented expression of anger, about 3,000 tribal women Wednesday demonstrated in Barwani before the district collector and the superintendent of police. The demonstrators, including children, were protesting against the arrest of fellow tribals who questioned the rising incidents of maternal deaths in the district government hospitals. The women were gathered under the banner of Jagrit Advasi Dalit Sangathan (JADS), which works for the welfare of tribal farmers. Since April 2010 at...