Reply by Army in OA No 782 of 2023 (News item titled Forest Department sends notice to Army HQ for tree offences, which appeared in The Times of India dated 18/12/2023). The report of December 23, 2024 was uploaded to the NGT site on April 17, 2025. The affidavit was …
Using cell phones to broadcast text messages reminding health workers in Kenya how to treat children’s malaria increased the number of cases handled correctly, a study has found. The study by researchers from Oxford and the Kenya Medical Research Institute was published in The Lancet. It involved 119 health workers …
THE World Health Organization has raised alarm over leprosy spreading across India. With the disease infecting about 120,000 people every year, the country is now the biggest contributor to the global leprosy burden, the UN body said in a press release. The Union health ministry had declared the disease, which …
Over the past 15 years, performance-based financing has been implemented in an increasing number of developing countries, particularly in Africa, as a means of improving health worker performance. Scaling up to national implementation in Burundi and Rwanda has encouraged proponents of performance-based financing to view it as more than a …
Recent headlines worldwide reported the US government’s use of a fake vaccination programme in Pakistan for counter-terrorism purposes. Whether the story is true or not, the damage is already done once there is the slightest suspicion that a medical activity like a vaccination campaign may have a motive other than …
The Planning Commission of India has set up a working group to look into the drug regulatory mechanism in the country. One of the tasks the panel has been entrusted is to devise a strategy to weed out irrational drugs from the market. Most of these drugs are fixed dose …
The government’s ambitious mission to control diabetes has made a reluctant start. Worse, it suffers from lack of planning. The project was launched as part of the National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke (NPCDCS). The first phase of the diabetes control project started …
Pakistan’s Lady Health Workers’ programme has trained over 1,00,000 women to provide community health services in rural areas. Not only has the programme revitalised the primary health care system, it has also helped overcome the gendered division of public and private space that is a major obstacle to women’s access …
Three out of every five surgeries in three private hospitals in a Rajasthan town over the past six months were hysterectomies. After an RTI application revealed the scandal—the hysterectomies were unnecessary and conducted for money—the story took a dramatic downturn on the ethical scale: doctors of the three hospitals went …
A close examination of the ongoing debates on universal access to healthcare, both in national and international fora, reveals a plurality of ideological perspectives and motivations on how universal access can be achieved. This statement, issued at the end of a recent meeting of “participant observers”, brings their insights and …
The Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group has given its provisional progress report on developing a framework for universal health coverage. Its mandate is to suggest a strategy for universal health coverage rather than a universal healthcare system. The latter would be geared to a progressive socialisation of healthcare based …
A child with chest pain or tics, a toddler who is limping, a 12-year-old girl with abdominal pain or headaches, an infant whose fever does not respond to antibiotics — these are age-old challenges that pediatricians face. I have been teaching pediatrics to residents and medical students for more than …
In this paper, we address the issues of shortage and maldistribution of health personnel in southeast Asia in the context of the international trade in health services. Although there is no shortage of health workers in the region overall, when analysed separately, five low-income countries have some deficit. All countries …
Commonsense, logic and clarity provide an ageless quality to Ayurveda knowledge for health care. Ayurvedic institutions along with its teachers, students and practitioners are in despair – a crisis similar to that faced by contemporary Western medicine compatriots. We envision vaidya-scientists, a scholarly group of change agents, who are well …
The debate on responsibility for health takes place within political philosophy and in policy setting. It is increasingly relevant in the context of rationing scarce resources as a substantial, and growing, proportion of diseases in high-income countries is attributable to lifestyle. Until now, empirical studies of medical professionals' attitudes towards …
THE Uttar Pradesh government has issued show-cause notices to about 150 surgeons for not performing any surgery in the past three months. Most surgeons who received the notices were from Allahabad, Sitapur and Kanpur. The state has set a target of at least 50 surgeries a month for all government …
Newborn deaths account for 57% of deaths in children younger than 5 years in Pakistan. Although a large programme of trained lady health workers (LHWs) exists, the effectiveness of this training on newborn outcomes has not been studied. We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a community-based intervention package, principally …
India has a severe shortage of human resources for health. It has a shortage of qualified health workers and the workforce is concentrated in urban areas. Bringing qualified health workers to rural, remote, and underserved areas is very challenging. Many Indians, especially those living in rural areas, receive care from …
