Dhak, the rhythmic beat of which is apparently music to the Bengali ear, grated on my nerves on the night of Kali Puja. Woken up from sleep at midnight by the exuberant dhakis — Kali Puja is a signi...

A Supreme Court-mandated panel on Friday declared a public health emergency in the Delhi-NCR region and banned all construction activities till November 5.As pollution level in the region entered the ...

Ignoring a problem or being unaware of its existence does not make it go away. If anything, its scale often grows to unmanageable proportions. This was indicated by an independent study conducted acro...

India is busy building five-trillion-dollar castles in the air. In the meantime, less than 7 per cent of its children under two years of age get an adequate diet. The stark numbers thrown up by the Co...

Some burdens are Sisyphean — no amount of endeavour seems to make them any lighter. The burden of malnutrition in India can be counted among these. A report published in The Lancet showed that while...

When does death, which is both inevitable and natural, become a serious problem? One of the answers to this question lies in the World Health Organization’s latest global suicide report, which revea...

It is unlikely that India has heard of Mahesh Kumar from the Amdavadi suburb of Naroda. But Mr Kumar has a serious claim to fame. Or infamy, if you will. Some months ago, the gentleman became the firs...

One out of every four deaths in the world linked to air pollution may be happening in India. But the country has one of the weakest standards globally for a key pollutant like PM2.5, an ultra-fine par...

An international team of dental researchers on Thursday urged radical reforms in dentistry practices, flagging the lack of adequate evidence for some routinely prescribed treatment protocols and calli...

It’s been a few years but I clearly remember a visit to a chest ward in a hospital in Patna. Tuberculosis patients, their faces emaciated, lay on their beds, staring, coughing, in despair. These imp...