One of the perils of ignoring the environment is the consequent failure to notice that the environment never ignores you. Healthy environments support human health and flourishing even as conservation secures natural resources and livelihoods. On the flip side, environmental degradation rebounds as economic losses, while pollution strikes at the...

  Environmentalists watched as if in a trance, The negotiations that happened in Paris, France. But it was the same old show, As they all want to “grow”, And so there was no change in stance.   This limerick portrays a situation which some of us don’t want to witness in a few months’ time. As we embark on another World Environment Day c...

In India, we are the people who for centuries have been working hard, day and night to feed the whole nation. We ensure that our countrymen can get a decent meal for less than a dollar. However, our own per capita income is less than two dollars a day. What a paradox! Yes, I am talking about the farmers in India. This is the group of people in w...

How should we describe the current mood among Non-Governmental Organisations in India? “Unsettled” or “Disgruntled” would be a good start.  Good book-keeping, public image and paper work notwithstanding, the factors contributing to this state of being are both insidious and disturbing. The NGO movement in India began a few decades ago d...

Healthcare across the globe is facing a crisis of sorts. Though each country has got its own problems,  it may not be incorrect to say that all of them share the problem of affordability. Whether it is the United States, which is spending a whopping 17% of its not inconsiderable GDP on healthcare or any one of the sub-Saharan countries struggli...

ASHA is India’s community health worker.  With nearly 900,000 women volunteers across the country, the programme has survived for a decade. Unlike earlier community health worker programmes, it shows little evidence of withering away in the near future. I would like to raise two issues in this piece: One, what made the ASHA sustain over this ...

India suffers disproportionately from the burden of infectious diseases and it accounts for nearly half of India’s disease burden. In 2013, India had 881730 cases of malaria; and every three minutes, two people die of tuberculosis (TB). Many new disease outbreaks such as dengue, swine flu, chikungunya, bird flu have occurred in India over the pa...

The Constitution of India declares India to be a Union of States. There are 29 states and seven union territories, each at different stages of economic and social development. The Constitution also lays out the jurisdictions of the states and the central governments in the form of the State, Union and Concurrent lists. Health for example is a st...

Inequitable access to medicines still remains a challenge in most low and middle-income countries (LMICs). The situation in India is no different. Despite being the largest supplier of generic medicines and often referred to as ‘ the worlds pharmacy’, it is unable to ensure access to medicine to its own people. We are still struggling to imp...