Socialist stalwart Sharad Yadav passes away

Socialist stalwart Sharad Yadav passes away

• Socialist stalwart Sharad Yadav passes away
• Socialist stalwart and former JD(U) chief Sharad Yadav died at a hospital in Gurgaon. He was 75.
• A 7-term Lok Sabha and 4-term Rajya Sabha member, Yadav, a former Union Minister, had not been keeping well for some time.
• Born on July 1, 1947, at Babai in the Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh, Yadav was a gold medallist in engineering from Jabalpur Engineering College.
• He soon became active in youth politics, greatly influenced by socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia.
• Sharad Yadav was the bridge between Bihar and national politics for a long time and between the state’s two top leaders. He was also the one who got the Samata Party of George Fernandes and Nitish Kumar to merge with his Janata Dal (U), making it a bigger political identity and eventually a partner of the BJP after the 2005 Bihar Assembly elections.

CHCs face 80% shortfall of specialists, show Health Ministry data

• India is reeling under an acute shortage of specialist doctors, with a shortfall of nearly 80% of the required specialists at Community Health Centres (CHCs), reveals the Rural Health Statistics report published by the Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry.
• The CHCs are 30-bed block-level health facilities which are ideally supposed to provide basic care related to surgery, gynaecology, paediatrics and general medicine.
• The report points out that there is a shortfall of specialist doctors, including surgeons (83.2%), obstetricians and gynaecologists (74.2%), physicians (79.1%) and paediatricians (81.6%).
• There are 6,064 CHCs across India, and the Health Ministry has been unsuccessful in meeting the requirement for specialist doctors in most of these centres. This is despite the fact that in 2005, the number of specialist doctors in the CHCs was 3,550, which has seen a 25% increase to 4,485 in 2022.

India intensified crackdown on activists, media in 2022: Human Rights Watch report 

• The World Report 2023 of Human Rights Watch (HRW) released, said that Indian authorities had “intensified and broadened” their crackdown on activist groups and the media through 2022, adding that the “Hindu nationalist” Bharatiya Janata Party-led government used “abusive and discriminatory policies to repress Muslims and other minorities”.
• The BJP government’s promotion of Hindu majoritarian ideology provokes authorities and supporters to engage in discriminatory and at times violent actions against religious minorities.
• The HRW said authorities across India arrested activists, journalists, and other critics of the government on what it called “politically motivated” criminal charges, including that of terrorism.