‍Why ‍KCR Plans To Revive Much-Sought 'Federal Front' Plans?

Going by the size of the entourage and the ongoing churn in the opposition camp at the national level, it appears that Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) president and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, during his visit to Delhi on 2nd September, may tie up the loose ends of his Federal Front formation.Officially speaking, KCR is going to Delhi to lay the foundation stone for the construction of TRS office building in Delhi. The Centre had allotted 1,200 sq yards of land for TRS office at Vasanth Vihar in Delhi.

In the recent TRS state committee meeting, the party leadership had decided to go ahead with the construction of an impressive party office in Delhi. KCR will lay the foundation stone in the presence of TRS MLAs, MLCs, MPs and members of the State Executive Committee. According to CMO, the Chief Minister will leave for Delhi on 1st September and return to Hyderabad on 3rd September.

At the national level, former Union minister and Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee have initiated steps to unite 'anti -BJP forces' to fight with BJP in the next Lok Sabha elections. KCR perhaps thinks that the political atmosphere in the country is presently in favour of those whom he had previously  envisaged as part of his Federal Front: 'anti BJP' and 'anti Congress' forces. The image of BJP, notwithstanding the pull of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is fading. At the same time, the Congress, despite being a pan-India party, is not in a position to regain its lost ground by taking advantage of the present political situation.  

KCR is of the considered view that time is ripe to meet some political leaders at the national level who are against BJP and Congress on this occasion. KCR is also thinking of inviting some leaders to the function, but the problem is that the Delhi government has been strictly implementing Covid protocol with regard to any functions. Since it is not possible for KCR to gather all the leaders, he is also considering separate meetings with some of them to discuss the political agenda.

Sharad Pawar and Mamata Banerjee are in favour of the Congress party and want to form a front with anti-BJP parties, including Congress. But they don't want this front to be headed by Sonia Gandhi. KCR wants his Federal Front to comprise forces that are against BJP and Congress.

As for TS, TRS cannot join hands with the Congress because the grand old party is the main opposition in the state. 'Anti-BJP' parties like DMK, Janata Dal (Secular) of HD Deve Gowda, RJD of Tejaswi Yadav (Bihar) are also thinking that without the Congress it would not be possible to form a front at the national level against BJP.  Those parties have no problem with the Congress in their state-level politics, unlike the TRS in Telangana. Even Communist parties are in favour of having Congress in any front that may be formed ultimately to fight the BJP.  

Against this background, it remains to be seen which political leaders KCR would invite and how he would convince them to join his Federal Front at the national level. In fact, KCR has already discussed this issue with Mamata Banerjee, MK Stalin, Deve Gowda, Navin Patnaik, Hemanth Soren and others in the past.  They all are in favour of the Federal Front, though not minus Congress party.  In any case, KCR wants to be active in national politics ahead of the next Lok Sabha elections. #KhabarLive #hydnews

India’s Pioneering Women Qazis Ask Muslim Men: Have You Read The Quran?

Newly trained women Islamic clerics, or Qazis, have started work in towns across India, offering an invaluable support system to Muslim women, and inviting opposition from orthodox circles.

Iqra's world fell apart in six months.

In her telling, it began, as it often does, with marriage. The 23-year-old's marriage to Ali was an exchange programme of sorts. Ali was her cousin, son of her khaala, her mother's sister. In turn, Iqra's brother married the same khaala's daughter. Her khaala also became her mother-in-law. Such marriage between first cousins is commonplace among Muslims in South Asia.

'The Future Of Family Planning Now Goes Digital'

One of India’s most vocal advocates for youth rights to sexual health, Franklin Paul, has been introducing digital technologies to the rural youth.

Online shopping may have its pros and cons, but when it comes to buying products that have an invisible morality tag, it’s the safest possible option, believes Franklin Paul.

One of India’s most vocal advocates for youth rights to sexual health, education and products, Paul has spent over two years studying and introducing digital technologies to India’s rural youths.

Animal Rights Activists Face Cattle Smugglers’ Ire

While incidents of violence purported by cow vigilantes hit the headlines, what has gone relatively unnoticed is an ever increasing spate of attacks on animal rights activists who dared to take on the smugglers of cattle and other animals.

Some of these activists, whom INNLIVE interviewed, said there is little organised resistance to the illegal trade of meat, as vigilance at the sale points and at the highways remains lax.

Animal Trafficking Is Helping Terrorism Grow Despite Demonetisation

Illegal camel trade and terrorism are seldom mentioned in the same breath. A car rally was held in the national capital on February 2 by NGOs Dhyan Foundation and People For Animals (PFA) to protest atrocities on animals and the illegal trade of animals smuggled into Bangladesh via Bihar and West Bengal.

“United Humans Against Atrocities on Animals” was the theme of the rally, which started at Kasturba Gandhi Marg and made its first stop at the office of the resident commissioner for West Bengal at Baba Kharak Singh Marg - moving on to Bihar Bhawan in Chanakyapuri.

No State Is Too Small For The Modi-Shah Grand Plan For The BJP

There's a crucial difference between this BJP and that of yore. A forceful drive to imprint the BJP's presence on unmapped political terrain, displayed by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, was a feature never seen in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-LK Advani era.

Its absence was not for want of ambition because the BJP's principal strategist of those times, Pramod Mahajan, was as obsessed with displacing the Congress as the principal "national pole" of the big guns of today.

Asrar Jamayee: An 80-year-old Urdu poet declared dead by the Delhi government is struggling to survive

Asrar Jamayee’s satire was once awarded by the first Indian President, Dr Rajendra Prasad. Now, even local mushairas don’t invite him.

Asrar Jamayee, 80, an eminent Urdu poet, was declared dead by the Social Welfare Department of South Delhi in 2013, depriving him of his monthly pension of Rs 1,500. Since then, he has been fighting for survival. He lives alone in a rented single room littered with Urdu books (including his newly published ones, which lie under a thick layer of dust) and worn-out shervanis.

Exclusive: Race To Rashtrapathi Bhavan

2019 Calculations May Decide BJP’s Choices For President, Vice President. The unexpected is widely expected. The Modi government likes to surprise, keeping its cards close to its chest until it has to play them. We will know the name of the BJP's nominee for the post of President of India on 23 June and it may be none of the names in speculation until 22 June.

Why Are Thousands Of People Traveling All The Way To Hyderabad To Swallow A Live Fish?

Hyderabad is a crowded city right now. Thousands of people have gathered here from across India and overseas, and have been waiting outside the Nampally Exhibition Grounds since last evening. They want the miraculous medicine, the 'fish prasadam', that is believed to cure asthma.

For years now, the Bathini Goud family in Hyderabad has been hosting this peculiar treatment camp where they provide 'fish prasadam', apparently as a cure for a host of diseases, for free. They have been been distributing this miraculous fish medicine since 1845. This year, the Bathini Mrigasira Karthi Fish Prasadam trust is ready with 200 kilograms of fish made to satisfy four lakh prasadam takers.

India’s Diabetes Epidemic Is Making A Worrying Demographic Shift

More than 10% of urban Indians have diabetes, at least half of Indians who have it don't know it, and the prevalence of the disease is increasingly shifting to poorer people, the largest nationally study of the disease in India has found.

The Indian Council of Medical Research-India Diabetes (ICMR-INDIAB) study is the largest nationally representative study of diabetes in India and includes data from 57,000 people across 15 states; glucose tolerance tests were performed on participants to diagnose diabetes and pre-diabetes. The study was published in the medical journal Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology late on Wednesday night.

How Three Pakistani Nationals, Living In Bengaluru, Managed To Get Aadhaar Cards?

Employee marks attendance through Aadhaar based System in the Planning Commission.

Recently, three Pakistani nationals who were living in India under false identities were arrested in Bengaluru. Among their identity documents, there were also Aadhaar cards that all of them seemed to possess.

The two men and one woman have been identified as Khasif Shamsuddin, Samira Abdul Rahman, and Kiron Ghulam Ali. An Indian citizen, Muhammed Shihab, a native of Kerala, reportedly helped them.

So how did these Pakistani nationals manage to get Aadhaar cards?

Unpaid and shunned, ragpickers are critical for waste management in India

They help clean up a significant proportion of the 62 million tonnes of waste generated annually.

The Ajmer Shatabdi pulls into the New Delhi station every night at around 11 pm. During the six-hour journey from Ajmer, the train serves tea, snacks, soup, dinner and dessert – more food than an average person can eat in that time.

An Indian politician gifts brides laundry bats to tackle abusive husbands

This minister’s message to Indian women is simple: “If your alcoholic husband is physically abusive, thrash him.”

When one suffering woman asked Madhya Pradesh minister Gopal Bhargava if it was all right to beat up her abusive spouse with a mogri, the wooden bat traditionally used to wash clothes, he took the idea seriously. After all, Bhargava had been receiving numerous such complaints.

From identity to economics: How the BJP is changing Indian politics

After tactically using caste arithmetic, the party has also consciously tried to undermine social justice as casteism and secularism as appeasement.

The Uttar Pradesh Assembly election results are not a one-time anomaly. They are repeat of the 2014 Lok Sabha results. In fact, the Bharatiya Janata Party has improved on its performance in 2014. Because the party seems set to stay in Indian politics for a long innings, it is important to reflect on what its politics means and what it is doing or going to do once in power in such an overwhelming manner.

While the BJP has cynically employed the use of religious identity, it has also consciously sought to downplay identity politics or social justice on the basis of caste or community in the last decade, particularly in the last few years. This is clear from the way the party brought a non-Jat politician to lead Haryana and encouraged a counter-mobilisation against the Jat hegemony. It also appointed a non-tribal chief minister Jharkhand and has persisted with one in Chhatisgarh. The party does not even seem to mind a Gujarati hegemony.

Where the party excels at is to package and present itself as rising above caste and community, decrying social justice as casteism, and secularism as appeasement, as Vandita Mishra points out in the Indian Express, after having carefully and “astutely picking a large number of its candidates from the large scatter of non-Yadav OBC [Other Backward Classes] castes, for instance, to add them to its traditional upper caste Brahmin-Thakur mix”, even while making a pronounced bid for backward caste support.

In fact, the success of the party’s political vision is evident from the fact that what appeared earlier as impossible seems to be the new normal now. For example, in a state like Jharkhand, the party brought in fundamental change by amending the land tenancy laws so as to serve the corporate capital and yet there was hardly any effective resistance to the move.

Most of the BJP’s important leaders also happen to be well-honed cadres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The party seems to have made an effort to ensure that such candidates are given crucial postings, with a view to a more disciplined and ideologically committed leadership for the governments – at the Centre and in the states.

In other words, the BJP has sought to downplay one of the traditional basis of politics – that of social identities – because it hampers growth and expansion of capital.

The 2014 Lok Sabha results and now the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election results have shown how the BJP has created an anti-local, anti-caste, anti-region political ambience by ensuring that a combination of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah become acceptable to people across regions.

The Manifesto of the party for Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections began by saying:

“The Party has begun the implementation of aims of social and economic justice through good governance (sushashan) under the leadership of Shri Narendra Modi”.

Beyond this point the Manifesto talked in an idiom of class and professions, laying down how the party’s perspective on and vision of development has to reach the youth, poor, business community, women and others.

The party simply does not use the concept of social justice the way other political formations do.

Economic argument
It is in this sense that one can see how the BJP seeks to build a political agenda beyond the social identities. It tries to reach out to all of them through some economic argument or the other.

The party seems to know and understand that gradually it has to be a politics of class, which will allow it to expand because its historical legacy of being a brahmanical political force alienated it for quite some time from the Muslims and Dalits.

In the last three years or so, the party has amply shown how well religion and other social and cultural affiliations can only be used to ensure a very clearly defined rule of corporate capital. However, these affiliations along with that of nation, and other such are only instruments for mobilisation, if at all.

The violence in campuses could be seen as an example of how the party uses the instrument of lumpenism to ensure that voices of dissent can be suppressed by use of collective force.

Social justice is not a term often invoked by the Indian State after 2014. And yet the BJP cannot completely do away with the decades-long practices of positive discrimination in policy making because the move might invite strong counter mobilisation against it. Which is what explains the party’s conscious decision of going slow on its earlier discourse and policy programmes based on social identities. But the so-called slips of tongue on quotas and reservation and demonisation of Dalit activists is a clear indication of what many of the party’s leaders think on these questions.

In days to come, the BJP would rather focus on policy areas that would more proactively bring Dalits and tribals within the fold of the market. The policy decisions of the BJP are aimed at breaking the consensus on the need of taking affirmative action to remove social inequalities among groups.

Social reengineering
The BJP seeks to transform everybody into an individual, concerned only about their own self, while ironically seeking votes from them or expressing outrage in the name of Hinduism. The collective, as noted above, continues to be invoked when needed but only as a mere source of mobilisation to move towards a fragmented/individuated situation.

This thinking, while destroying their social and cultural allegiances, would transform each citizen into somebody who would cease to be concerned about the marginalised, oppressed or discriminated groups and communities. This would also lead to weakening of any opposition to whatever the state would do – from handing over the economy to corporate capital to making education institutions into skilling centres among other things.

​The BJP campaigns in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections mocked the gains that the Other Backward Classes and Dalit political mobilisations have made in these states. The party has routinely sought to underplay that there was any significant historic element of caste based discrimination. In Haryana, for instance, the party has come down heavily on unionisation of workers in the industrial belts of the state.

It has thus sought to delegitimise all movements that claim to represent social or economic justice. Which is why there is hardly any large scale resistance even when, for instance, the Haryana government unabashedly celebrates its foundation year using the symbol of a conch with a chariot embedded in it among other things. The party has thus got away by introducing overtly religious motifs in a secular country. Nor is there any public anger when workers are

The BJP represents a new moment in Indian politics. It understands and knows how to manipulate the social and cultural milieu much better than any other force towards making India fully compatible to the workings of corporate capital and seeking to break down the consensus on community and caste-based concepts of social justice.

If the political forces fail to understand this they would find it difficult to counter the BJP’s winning streak, even in 2019.

Health Crisis: India's Wealthier States Are Showing An Alarming Decline In Immunisation Process

By NEWSCOP | INNLIVE

The warning signs from the latest National Family Health Survey data have gone unnoticed so far.

A fair amount of media attention has been given to the resurgence of diphtheria in Kerala, which has been attributed to some Muslims rejecting immunisation efforts due to misinformation. However, a much more dangerous and widespread trend of declining immunisation rates as evidenced by the recent National Family Health Survey 4 data, seems to have gone entirely unnoticed.

'Cow Vigilantes': Has Moditva Started Ascending Over Hindutva?

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

Indeed, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hit out at those indulging in "cow vigilantism” thrice: First, he made it clear to them thatswayamseva wasn't about suppressing and terrifying others; it was about empathy and sacrifice.

Wrath Of Gau Rakshaks: Recall Gandhi’s Words On Hypocrisy Of Cow Protection

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

“Oh Hindu brothers, help us… those who are Hindus should assemble for cow protection and should write and make over five ‘chitthis’ to others, failing which he will be sinful of killing five cows.” These circular letters called patias were distributed all over Uttar Pradesh and Bihar from 1885 onwards to stoke communal passion.

Spotlight: Should Hospitals Give Patients 'Unbanked Blood' To Save Lives?.

By MITHILESH MISHRA | INNLIVE

Unbanked blood transfusion is illegal. But short of blood, rural hospitals in Chhattisgarh say it is not unethical.

In April, a woman walked into a hospital in Baitalpur in Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh, bleeding heavily. She was in her thirties, and had ruptured her uterus while delivering a baby at home in a nearby village. She needed urgent medical attention. When a van dropped her off on the highway, she trudged two kilometres to Baitalpur's Evangelical Mission Hospital – only to be turned away.

The hospital had an operation theatre and a gynaecologist, but no blood.

With buses plying only once in two-three hours from Baitalpur to Bilaspur, the district headquarters, getting blood from the blood bank takes at least four to five hours, if not a day. Without a quicker way to access blood, the hospital is not equipped to handle an emergency.

“She had a ruptured uterus and was anaemic," said Dr Kusum Masih, the medical superintendent of the hospital who is also a gynaecologist. "We could not operate without blood."

The doctors sent her to Bilaspur about 35 km away – but she died on her way there.

Eleven districts with no blood banks
There are 16 blood government-run blood banks and 30 private ones across 27 districts of Chhattisgarh.

The deficit of blood in the state is about 48%, said Dr SK Binjhwar, from the State Blood Transfusion Council. According to the World Health Organisation, a country should have a stock of blood equivalent to 1% of its population. By this standard, Chhattisgarh alone needs 25 lakh units of blood at any given point – but it usually collects 16 lakhs units a year.

What's more, 11 out of 27 districts in Chhattisgarh do not have blood banks – the largest deficit in any state in the country. In all, there are 81 districts in the country without blood blanks, according to data from the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Most of them are concentrated in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and the North East.

For Chhattisgarh, a state with very high rates of anaemia, especially among women and children, the shortage of blood throws up multiple challenges.

According to the National Family Health Survey, more than half of the women of the state – about 57% – suffer from anaemia, as do nearly three-quarters, or 71.2% of children aged 0-5. About 2% of both women and children have severe anaemia, with a haemoglobin level below seven grams per decilitre of blood, for which most patients need blood transfusions.

Apart from this, about 60,000 children are estimated to have sickle cell anaemia, a severe form of the condition caused by a genetic blood disorder.

Anaemic women additionally face a higher risk of postpartum haemorrhage, which is a leading cause of maternal mortality in India. The maternal mortality rate of Chhattisgarh is 230 deaths for every 1,00,000 live births, as compared to the national average of 178.

Unbanked blood
For a rural hospital in Chhattisgarh, there is just one option in case of emergencies where blood is required – to refer a patient to a bigger facility. This often means that the person reaches the hospital in a critical condition, or dies on the way, as in the Baitalpur case.

Some hospitals are countering this by opting for an illegal way of giving blood, called unbanked direct blood transfusion. Under this, the blood of a willing donor’s that matches with the recipient’s group is collected, tested for infection with a rapid blood kit and then transfused without roping in a blood bank.

Take the case of a 40-year old woman from Shahdol district in Madhya Pradesh, who had been having extremely painful menstrual bleeding for nearly four months.

“Khoon girat rahe [I was bleeding all the time],” she said. “But, I would still have to work in our fields. How can I stop?” She was also not able to eat or walk and had severe chest pain.

On June 28, she somehow made it to a rural hospital in Chhattisgarh, which shares a border with Madhya Pradesh, travelling more than 200 km by train and bus with her husband and son.

When the doctors examined her blood, they saw she had a haemoglobin count of 4.6 – the normal range for women is between 12.1 and 15.1 – which meant she needed immediate transfusion. She also required an abdominal hysterectomy, as she had a large fibroid in her uterus.

In all, she needed three units of blood.

“I do not know how she managed to travel so far,” said a doctor at the hospital. “There is barely any oxygen reaching the organs. We have patients coming in with haemoglobin count of one as well. We can't direct such patients to other hospitals as their condition is already critical.”

The names of the hospitals and the doctors have been withheld because it is illegal to get blood from any other establishment other than a blood bank.

In this case, her son gave one unit of blood through unbanked direct blood transfusion, while two other units were arranged legally.

Doctors have been arrested in the past for using unbanked blood in other states.

Hospitals that practice unbanked blood transfusion usually have a list of donors in the community who can come and give blood when required. These donors are usually not paid – unless they demand payment and the situation is dire.

Insufficient blood
In 1996, the Supreme Court outlawed professional blood donation – that is, donating blood for money – and ordered the establishment of National Blood Transfusion Council to oversee and strengthen policies and systems governing blood transfusion in the country. In 1998, unbanked directed blood transfusion was disallowed.

In 2002, the council allowed the setting up of blood storage centres that were allowed to keep blood from licensed blood banks (but were not authorised to collect it). These storage centres could come up in villages and towns, while the mother blood banks would usually be in the district headquarters or cities.

In Chhattisgarh, there are 60 such storage units, mostly in community health centres, many of which do not use the blood at all and direct patients to go to other healthcare facilities. For instance, the community health centre in Gaurella, attached to the Chhattisgarh Institute of Medical Sciences in Bilaspur, has never approached the storage unit for blood. “I am not even sure it [the centre] functions,” said Dr VP Singh, who is in charge of the blood storage centre in the Bilaspur college.

Patients from community health centres often make their way to Jan Swasthya Sahyog, a non-profit in Ganiyari, near Bilaspur city. “Often, we see patients who are bleeding copiously after childbirth and are referred to us in that condition,” said Dr Yogesh Jain, one of the founders of the hospital.

Even hospitals that do use blood storage units, such as Jan Swasthya Sahyog, Shaheed Hospital in Dalli Rajahara in Chhattisgarh's Balod district and the mission hospitals, said they get insufficient units of blood.

“Our storage centre is attached to a mother blood bank in Durg,” said Dr Saibal Jana, chief physician of Shaheed Hospital. “We need about 150 units per month, but have barely about 35 units from the bank. Last month, they gave us only 10.”

Jan Swasthya Sahyog has an understanding with a private blood bank in the city, which gives them blood nearing its expiry date for free. This they use for scheduled surgeries, when the blood requirement is known.

Replacement donation
For every unit of blood taken from the bank, hospitals are supposed to send a replacement donor to the mother blood bank. This unwritten rule holds true even for hospitals that send relatives of patients to collect blood from a blood bank – private or public – for a planned surgery.

This is against the country’s National Blood Policy, which prohibits coercion in enlisting replacement donors and aims to phase replacement donations out.

Dr SK Binjhwar, from the State Blood Transfusion Council in Chhattisgarh, said that the state has 80% voluntary donation. Public health activists, however, said this figure is highly debatable and that more than 99% of the blood is likely collected through replacement donation.

“A hospital that has a blood storage unit organises blood donations camps for mother blood banks,” said Bhinjwar. “This is enough to meet the demands of the districts.”

The demand for a replacement donor for the mother blood bank hangs like a sword over the heads of patients’ family members.

Many donors from the hinterlands are not willing to travel to the nearest blood bank in the city to replace blood. It’s also difficult to find eligible donors in the immediate family – if a patient has anaemia, it’s likely that members of her family would also suffer from the condition.

Many also have an apprehension towards donating blood, fearing it causes weakness.

In such a scenario, touts who can provide ready donors for a price thrive. There are many such businesses in operation near blood banks in the state that provide donors for a sum of money to provide replacement units to the banks.

Rajesh Sharma, who runs the laboratory in Jan Swasthya Sahyog said that touts realise that people are looking for donors for replacement donation when they see an icebox in their hands. To combat this, Jan Swasthya Sahyog sends a patient's relative for replacement donation, they now send a letter (pictured below) that has to be signed by the blood bank.

People who are unaware about the dangers of remunerative blood donation – which has higher chances of infection – are willing to pay for the blood, despite having meagre resources.

In a rural hospital in Chhattisgarh, a 76-year-old was diagnosed with nectrotising fasciitis – a severe bacterial skin infection that spreads to the tissues quickly – on her arm. She had to be operated upon immediately to remove the infected tissues, but her haemoglobin count was just 6.3. During the surgery, the hospital collected blood via unbanked direct blood transfusion. But they were short of one unit.

“I do not know who will donate now...can we buy the blood?,” asked her daughter, who was tending to her.

While admitting that most units of blood are given only after a replacement donation, Dr Singh from the Bilaspur college's blood storage unit said: “We give blood to people who do not have replacements too."

"Usually if someone is an orphan with no family support, or someone comes without attendants, we give the bank without exchange too (referring to replacement donation)," he added.

Dr Singh said he had instituted a rule that no sickle-cell patients should be asked for replacement donors as he found out that the patients' families were bringing in professional donors, especially when the patient needed immediate treatment.

Unbanked blood ethical?
In a scenario where lack of access to blood banks has resulted in deaths that could have been avoided and helped touts flourish, doctors and healthcare activists practicing in rural areas have pushed for unbanked direct blood transfusion to be legalised, even as other activists argue that it shouldn't.

In June, Dr Yogesh Jain and Dr Raman Kataria from Jan Swasthya Sahyog wrotein favour of the practice in Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. They said that unbanked directed blood transfusion, if done by trained and certified healthcare teams, meets ethical standards and helps fulfil emergency blood requirements in rural areas.

In 2014, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare met a delegation from the Association of Rural Physicians that sought to legalise this practice. Though the Drug Technical Advisory Board considered the proposal, it was eventually rejected.

The delegation argued that there the Drugs and Cosmetics Act allows unbanked directed blood transfusion for Armed Forces in border areas and peripheral hospitals, which should be extended to the same in emergency situations in rural areas too.

The Drug Technical Advisory Board, however, said that testing of safe blood requires a lot of infrastructure and trained manpower, without which the blood is likely to be infected. Besides, they said, it would be difficult to monitor them. They also said that the exemption given to Armed Forces cannot be given to rural hospitals.

“Are soldiers' life more important than a woman giving birth?" asked Dr Jain. "The implication of this policy is that either people go to the cities for treatment, or choose to die wherever they are. People who have to handle emergencies have to be equipped with technology and regulations should look into the ethical requirement of safe blood.”

An ideal solution, said doctors, would be to increase blood availability in the country by having a central blood bank in each district, with well-equipped storage centres.

However, activists working towards ensuring voluntary blood donation said that unbanked direct blood donation should not be allowed.

“All hell will break loose," said Vinay Shetty, from Think Foundation, Mumbai and a member of Voluntary Blood Donation Committee of Maharashtra State Blood Transfusion Council. "There will be no control over the blood in this country and we will go back in time."

The state has to take responsibility for the shortage of blood and has to ensure that no bank is short of blood, he said.

“The only answer to this is blood sufficiency," said Shetty. "Organising blood is not the responsibility of the patient. It is the responsibility of society at large. This is happening because there is no value to human life. Somebody in the state has to take charge."

Opinion: Why 'Goods And Services Tax' (GST) Is Harmful To India?

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

The Goods and Services Tax will destroy governance and end incentives for states to attract businesses, harming the country in the long run.

It finally happened. Late on Wednesday, the Rajya Sabha approved a bill that will change the way India collects taxes.

The Goods and Services tax, which aims to get rid of the current patchwork of indirect taxes and to improve tax compliances, has been in the headlines for some time now.

Investigation: The Toil Of 20,000 Child Workers Are Behind The Healthy Exports Of 'Illegal Mica Mines'

By NEETA BHALLA | INNLIVE

At least seven child labourers have died in the mines since June, a Thomson Reuters Foundation investigation has found.

In the depths of India’s illegal mica mines, where children as young as five work alongside adults, lurks a dark, hidden secret – the cover-up of child deaths with seven killed in the past two months, a Thomson Reuters Foundation investigation has revealed.