By Paramita Chaudhuri

India offers just one hospital bed nationally per 15,400 mentally ill patients. The situation in West Bengal is no different. A unique outsider art exhibition of dolls in Kolkata recently helped mentally handicapped individuals from two state-run institutions make dolls that communicate their lives and aspirations to each other and the outside world More...

By Anosh Malekar

With the spotlight on lifestyle diseases like diabetes and hypertension, traditional illnesses like sickle cell disease, which affects tribals all across India, are not receiving the attention they deserve More...

Rashme Sehgal visits a state-of-the-art sick and newborn care unit in the Guna district hospital in Madhya Pradesh. When set up across 50 districts in MP, this model is expected to reduce the infant mortality rate from 74 to 40 per 1,000 More...

By Usha Rai

A drop-in sexual-health centre in New Delhi and an adolescence sex education programme for class 10 students in rural and urban Haryana clearly demonstrate the benefits of sexuality education and counseling for youth More...

By M Suchitra

A unique home-based palliative and chronic care movement is sweeping through Kerala. Thousands of trained citizens are volunteering two hours a week to take care of the chronically ill in villages and cities. Funding for this community-based scheme that has won WHO recognition comes in cash and kind from citizens, including schoolchildren, bus drivers, labourers and others More...

By Anjali Deshpande

The Union Ministry of Health is examining the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act with a view to raising the time limit for abortion from 20 weeks to 24 weeks. What would the moral and ethical implications of this move be? And why has the women’s movement in India been strangely silent on these important developments? More...

With smoking in offices and private establishments banned from October 2, India is finally recognising that tobacco consumption is a major public health problem. But the ban by itself will not work. We need to reduce accessibility to all tobacco products, including gutkha, by taxing them out of reach and banning their sale in public places, says Deepanjali Bhas More...

By Rashme Sehgal

After the furore over the direct nature of India’s Adolescence Education Programme last year, NACO has come up with a sexuality education module that dare not mention ‘intercourse’ or ‘safe sex’ or even ‘condoms’. Over 30 groups working with sexuality have rejected the material More...

By Alok Prakash Putul

India passed the Leprosy Act in 1898 to ensure that leprosy patients did not face discrimination. A hundred years on, Indian laws and regulations do just that. Legislation in several states prevents leprosy patients from obtaining a driving licence, travelling in trains, and contesting panchayat elections. And many marriage laws make “contracting leprosy” grounds for divorce More...

By Benita Sen

Cancer patient Roshanara’s morphine tablets keep her relatively pain-free. Morphine is part of palliative care, which allows terminally ill patients to live a life of dignity, free of pain. Why, then, is it so scarce in India? More...

By Aditi Rao

Over 4,000 people live in the Delhi leprosy complex. Though leprosy has been eliminated -- not eradicated -- in India, the stigma and discrimination that leprosy patients and their children face is far from eliminated, and it is only in colonies like this one that they can find companionship and a home More...

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