Mumbai: The Maharashtra government has reduced the cut-off age for child labour in hazardous industries from 18 to 14.

A government resolution issued by the state labour department on March 2 stated that anyone employing children below 14 in hazardous industries will be prosecuted and fined Rs20,000 for each child employed.

The state's "regressive" step has shocked child labour activists.

More than 39 lakh children in Madhya Pradesh suffer from malnutrition and ten districts have been identified as malnutrition-affected, Minister of State for Women and Child Development Ranjana Baghel told the Assembly today.

The number of school-going children is declining in the state as the mid-day meal scheme started as an attraction, has failed to achieve the aim.

Vidya Krishnan, Sreenivas Janyala & Gopu Mohan: UNTIL a few months back, Avinashilingam University for Women in Coimbatore was known for little except the courses it offered. Suddenly, the university in Tamil Nadu finds itself at the peak of a health drink advertisement campaign, based on a research it conducted.

Dr Muhammad Rafiq Program Specialist, Unicef has said that Pakistan was still on the top of the list of polio endemic countries and there was need of collective efforts and political commitment to halt circulation of poliovirus in the society. He was addressing inaugural ceremony of March 2009 anti-polio round in Peshawar.

Observing that the preservation of ecology is a fundamental challenge, Governor NN Vohra has said Shri Amarnath Shrine Board will take a firm initiative in funding eco-awareness-cum-conservation campaigns and supplementing the afforestation programmes in selected areas.

Kidney diseases among the people under 15 are on the rise and they now constitute half of the total renal patients in the country, renal specialists said on Wednesday.
The nephrologists said an estimated 49 lakh adolescents and children suffer from different kidney aliments and 50 thousand of them die each year due to renal failure. Ninety per cent of these patients die without treatment.

UNICEF has brought 60 MT of supplementary food (Unimix) to Jaffna, to be distributed to 4,500 moderately malnourished children (including those in the new IDP camps) in the Jaffna District over the next six months, the joint humanitarian update released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.

The provincial health department has launched a new

The provincial health department has launched a new