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India opened an advanced radiotherapy unit in western Gujarat on Monday, serving eleven districts and about 15.4 million people whose cancer patients have until now travelled to Ahmedabad or Mumbai for the same treatment Image Via: @JPNadda on X Distance matters more in radiation oncology than in most specialties. A course of treatment is typically delivered in small daily doses over several weeks, so a patient from Porbandar or Amreli faced either repeated journeys of several hundred kilometres or a long stay in a city away from home and work. The facility at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Rajkot removes that for the Saurashtra region. It cost around 390 million rupees and was built under a central programme intended to correct regional gaps in specialist care. Patients covered by India’s public health insurance scheme will be treated free; others will pay subsidised rates. The unit houses a linear accelerator, a wide-bore CT simulator for treatment planning and...

Smog settled over Bandra Kurla Complex on Saturday morning and the city’s municipal corporation spent the day setting out, at length, how much better Mumbai’s air has become Image Source: @iam_Jinesh on X Mumbai has recorded 231 days in the good or satisfactory air quality categories so far this year, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation said, against 218 in all of 2025, 216 in 2024 and 185 in 2023. PM10, the coarser airborne dust, is down by about 48 per cent since 2017-18, according to the environment ministry’s monitoring portal. It listed the machinery behind this. Twenty-eight guidelines for construction sites and seventy-six ward squads to enforce them, each required to inspect two sites a day. Compulsory sensor monitors at building sites, 3,166 of them wired to a central dashboard. Twenty-nine road sweepers. Covered debris lorries with washed wheels, tracked through a dedicated system. Cleaner fuel at 384 of the city’s 593 bakeries, which it calculates produce 3.5 per cent...

Kalawati Saran to go from 394 to 894 beds, with intensive care capacity rising fivefold Image Source: @JPNadda on X A children's hospital in central Delhi is to more than double its bed capacity as part of an expansion reviewed on Monday by India's health minister, J P Nadda.  Kalawati Saran Children's Hospital will go from 394 beds to 894, its intensive care capacity from 40 beds to 200, and its operating theatres from four to twelve. Construction is under way on the campus. The hospital is attached to Lady Hardinge Medical College, one of Delhi's oldest public medical institutions, along with Sucheta Kriplani Hospital. Minister Nadda reviewed progress across all three, covering infrastructure, clinical services, medical education and research. The government says the expansion is intended to strengthen specialist paediatric care and to widen capacity for training doctors at undergraduate, postgraduate and super-speciality level. Public hospitals in Indian cities ro...

  A Kolkata hospital that has spent seventeen years quietly doing its thing exceptionally well Representational Image: IndianRepublic.in There is a photograph on the wall behind the reception desk at the entrance. The man in it carries an unmistakable presence but it is the eyes that hold you. They seem to look directly at whoever is standing in front of them and they keep looking as you move, following your gaze until you have walked out of their sight altogether.  You notice the eyes because of where you are. This is a hospital that does nothing but eyes and the man in the photograph is late Aditya Birla. The full name is Aditya Birla Sankara Nethralaya, on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass at Mukundapur in south Kolkata. It is a unit of Sankara Nethralaya, which in Sanskrit means the temple of the eye, and the name is more than we think. The institution began in Chennai in 1978, founded by the ophthalmologist Sengamedu Srinivasa Badrinath after Jayendra Saraswathi, the Sankar...

Indian Health authorities have confirmed an outbreak of the Nipah virus in the eastern state of West Bengal, with at least five cases reported, including doctors and nurses now under treatment in hospitals across Kolkata.  At least one patient is in critical condition, and nearly 100 individuals have been placed under home quarantine as officials are moving quickly to contain the spread. India's central government has dispatched a rapid response team to oversee containment and treatment measures. Representational Image: Pubity on X The outbreak has prompted international response, with Thailand initiating health screenings at major airports for travelers arriving from West Bengal.  South Korean authorities have already designated Nipah as a first-class legally notifiable infectious disease by the time this report was being written. The Nipah virus is classified by the World Health Organization as a deadly zoonotic pathogen with no vaccine or cure. It has a high fatality rat...

Addressing the 78th World Health Assembly in Geneva on Tuesday, India reaffirmed its commitment to universal health coverage and equitable access to healthcare , calling for a binding global framework that strengthens international cooperation while protecting national sovereignty. The intervention came under the Assembly’s central theme, “One World for Health.” Image Source: PIB India Delivering India’s national statement, Union Health Secretary Smt. Punya Salila Srivastava outlined the country’s expanding role in global health governance, highlighting key domestic achievements and underscoring the importance of inclusive, transparent, and equitable pandemic preparedness systems. India’s flagship initiative, Ayushman Bharat , took centre stage in the address. Srivastava noted that the scheme had expanded access to healthcare, improved infrastructure, enabled financial protection for critical treatments , and significantly accelerated digital health adoption . A recent policy expans...