Deccan Dispatches 1 On 26 August, ice, rock and water came down the Bhote Koshi river in Nepal, and took out towns and villages on both sides of the Nepal-China border. Experts are still arguing about the exact trigger with an avalanche into a glacial lake possibly being one of the prevalent explanations. The UN was on the ground within a day...

Between 2024 and 2025, Developmental Assistance for Health (DAH) declined by 21%, driven largely by a 67% reduction in US financing. Yet, the more uncomfortable question is not why aid is declining, but whether the prevailing model was ever designed to make itself unnecessary. Perhaps then, the greater indictment is not the current retrenchment ...

The Indian “cockroach movement” led by Cockroach Janta Party is a recent and vivid expression of Gen Z anger and youth mobilization. It emerged after the Chief Justice of India compared some unemployed young people to ‘cockroaches’ during a court hearing; he later clarified that he had not intended to disparage India’s youth as a whol...

Why being global health’s indispensable payer no longer buys leadership Germany may be the country the World Health Organization (WHO) can least afford to lose. That does not make it the country others are willing to follow. The United States has withdrawn from WHO, reduced foreign assistance for health and begun recasting its global health e...

Since 2017, Goa has reported no human deaths from rabies. Through sustained dog vaccination, surveillance, and community engagement, the state has done something once considered impossible in my country, India: it has interrupted the transmission of one of the world’s oldest and deadliest diseases. This achievement did not happen overnight. It b...

From July 26-31st 2026, the 26th International AIDS Conference (AIDS2026), took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I was fortunate to attend one of the largest HIV-related events.  This year’s conference theme was  “Rethink. Rebuild. Rise”, referring to the huge changes in the funding landscape, the need to thoroughly rethink the HIV/AIDS ba...

On 27 April 2026, my father (age 83) died peacefully at home after a rapid decline from advanced liver cancer. Just over a month earlier, what had begun as seemingly common symptoms gradually developed into a terminal diagnosis of metastatic liver and bile duct cancer. From late March to the end of April, my family moved between several places o...

“My ten-year-old son has a fixed activity in his daily routine—30 minutes to one hour of watching scrolling videos on the phone. If he misses this even for a day, he quickly reminds me, ‘Today I haven’t watched the phone at all, give me your phone.’” What began as a small allowance for entertainment has slowly turned into an expectat...

Walk into almost any government school in India and you will likely find a toilet block for girls. On paper, the progress is real: the government’s own school-records system, the Unified District Information System for Education, (UDISE+) 2024–25 data, which tracks every recognized school in the country, reports that 97.3% of schools have girl...