The health ministry has asked that the course should be mandatory for all classes and should include environment education, HIV/AIDS education and lifestyle education, reports Chetan Chauhan.
The Health ministry has asked the HRD ministry to make health education mandatory for all classes, Health Minister A Ramadoss said on Wednesday.
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Speaking at a sensitisation programme organised by Jansankya Sthirata Kosh, Ramadoss said a formal proposal has already been submitted with the HRD ministry.
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The health ministry has asked that the course should be mandatory for all classes and should include environment education, HIV/AIDS education and lifestyle education.
He also highlighted the need to stablise population saying India accounts for 16 per cent of the world's population but has only 2 per cent of its land. By 2045-2050, India' population would be 1.8 billion.
But, the government has got some good news with National Family Health Family survey saying that even Muslim women in UP want not more than two children, the minister said.
Earlier, Executive Director of Kosh Shailaja Chandra pointed at adverse social indicators which said that about 60 per cent of the country's population is in the reproductive age and that will mean that 1.61 crore people would be added by next year.
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The main contributor to rising population are northern states, where reproductive age is much more than the national level.
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The main contributor to rising population are northern states, where reproductive age is much more than the national level.
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Chandra also said about 52 per cent of girls in Bihar and 49 per cent in Rajasthan are married before they attain the age of 18. Mostly these girls cannot decide the number of children they want as normally the decision is taken by someone else, she said.
Ramadoss also interacted with children from states with high rate of population growth and found that some of the teenagers were already married. One of the married boy said he was married young by his parents and was already a father.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
