A leap of faith can save us from botheration. The finance minister had undertaken a foreign trip for medical treatment, which made him miss a coveted function — the presentation of the Union budget....

The death of five sanitation workers in Delhi is a grim reminder of the hostile conditions that confront manual scavenging in India. Manual scavenging has been prohibited by law. Yet, it remains unche...

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...

The newly-launched Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana is set to cover 10.74 crore needy families. It is said to come with a robust mechanism to avoid fraud — in contrast to its antecedent, the Rashtri...

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...

The late Jonathan Mann, the WHO administrator who pioneered the global campaign against AIDS in the 1980s, had envisioned a future where public health, human rights and ethics would be seen as complem...

An impending price rise that is likely to raise India’s budget for a key vaccine by less than Rs 100 crore has prompted the government to seek an international donor’s help at a time it has built ...

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...

Indians evidently like being deafened and blinded. Nothing else can explain their love for firecrackers, on display most prominently during Diwali but also at the slightest pretext at other times. Yet...

On the first Sunday of every month, Dr Santanu Banerjee, MD, gets up at 4:30 in the morning and sets off for a small village some 300 kilometres from Calcutta. I’ve known Santanu for some years now,...