India is ready to enter the most critical phase of its fight against measles, the respiratory disease whose prevalence is eroding the country’s hard-earned child health gains and pushing back the reduction of the infant mortality rate which is the fourth Millennium Development Goal. Three out of every four children in the world who died of measles last year were from India. Our reported annual mortality from measles ranges from 50,000 to one lakh.

Tomorrow onwards through the entire months February and March, the government will be closely watching the culmination of its ambitious Measles catch-up campaign which began in November last year to administer a second dose of the Measles Containing Vaccine (MCV) to children left uncovered by the first dose administered during routine immunisation at 9 to 12 months of age.

The pilot campaign seeks to cover 13.4 crore children aged nine months to 10 years in the 14 most high-risk states (where the first MCV dose coverage is under 80 per cent) and will enter its last leg tomorrow as the remaining among the vulnerable states cover their respective target populations over the next two months. Jharkhand will take the lead here by rolling out the MCV second dose from tomorrow.

Through the month, it hopes to immunise eight lakh children in the five districts chosen for the pilot project. Close to 40,000 anganwari workers from the state have been roped in for the mammoth exercise during which Jharkhand expects 100 per cent coverage, Maoist infestation notwithstanding.

“During the first week of the campaign, we will cover school children after which we will have outreach camps and door-to-door coverage. Technical support is being offered by UNICEF,” Aradhna Patnaik, Director, National Rural Health Mission, Jharkhand, today told The Tribune correspondent in Ranchi.

Tripura will accompany Jharkhand in the campaign launch tomorrow while Nagaland, Gujarat and Meghalaya will roll it out from February 7, February 23 and March 20, respectively. The high-risk states that have already wound up their measles catch-up include Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana (five districts), Rajasthan, Manipur, Bihar, Chhattisgarh (nine districts) and Madhya Pradesh. From April, the project is expected to be scaled up. India contributes 75 per cent to the measles burden of Southeast Asia, the only WHO region which has failed to reduce measles deaths under the 2005 World Health Assembly pledge of reducing global measles mortality by 90 per cent until 2010.

It was then that the Assembly recommended a second dose of MCV for improved global measles immunisation. India went slow, acting only in November last year, and in the process squandering global gains. “Southeast Asia reduced measles deaths by just 46 per cent while the world reduced the same by 90 per cent. It saw 1, 64, 000 measles deaths last year-over 75 per cent of these were in India. Measles second dose is critical for improved population immunity because the first dose administered at 9 months is just 85 per cent effective. The second given beyond 12 months is 95 per cent effective,” Dr Debashish Roy, WHO specialist for SE Asia told The Tribune, reiterating vaccine safety.

They started their writing career in post liberalization era. Far more adventurous in terms of style and genre, less derivative and more experimental in their own voices, they carry confidence of a growing economy. These young, well-travelled, well dressed authors inhabiting multi cultural milieu do not believe in italicizing Hindustani words for a global English audience. Like their well- tonned up bodies, they do not allow unwanted flab in their books. These writers have not waited, greying, for the muse to reveal a magnum opus to them. They write about their here and now for a global audience, reclaiming English as their own. These thirty something magicians of written word, made their presence felt at JLF.

Poet of the much celebrated collection titled 'Countries of the Body', 2006 , for which she was given Forward Poetry Prize and was invited to poetry galas at Hay Festival, dancer with the troupe of late choreographe Chandralekha, journalist, and author of 'The Pleasure Seekers', defies everything one would associate with a serious author. She writes a popular blog on cricket Hit or Miss, and is working on the biography of cricketer Muttiah Murlitharan. In the first meeting she could be mistaken for a fashion model. Read her debut novel and you would admire her eye for detail scanning mosaic of human emotions; places, movements, beginnings and ends of these movements taken up by-lovers, wanderers, adventurers and their memories and exiles, that has gone into making the book.

The Pleasure Seekers is a gentle, funny and highly readable tribute to her parents' marriage. Her Welsh mother and Indian father are fictionalised as Sian Jones, the beautiful gap-toothed girl from North Wales working at a London office in the 60s, and Babo, the naive boy from Madras, new in town, who to the consternation of his family falls head over heels in love with Sian. Doshi has no qualms writing about her parents' love life. She likes to travel through the time her parents and grand parents lived their love life and youth. The portrayal of her grand parents, once soft- hearted lovers turned into authoritative parents fiercely opposing unsuitable match of their son Babo, makes the reader identify with the simple realities of life. The book published by Bloomsbury has won several honours.

Has written bestsellers, and books that became controversial and were eventually banned. She is smart enough to know that the small town reader, who does not get his/her stories written in English, would still like her narrative to be taken to the global audience. She writes these tales for English publications, which have the infrastructure to translate her stories in regional languages, to sell it back to the small town audience. Her autobiographical debut novel, Ancient Promises, a tale of pain and loneliness of coming to terms with marriage, fictionalized though, became a 'blockbuster with heart.' It was published and sold worldwide by Penguin UK and became a major bestseller in India.

Subsequent books include Accidents Like Love and Marriage , Afterwards and The Little Book of Romance. A historical novel based on the life of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi was published by Penguin in December 2007 and was soon banned by the Uttar Pradesh state government. In 2009, Misra signed a three- book deal with Avon, the commercial fiction imprint of Harper Collins UK. The first of these books, called Secrets and Lies, was published in June 2009 while the next in the series, Secrets and Sins was released in July 2010. Secrets and Lies appeared on the Heatseekers list in Britain's Bookseller magazine's best-seller lists in the summer of 2009. Mishra is also a special educationist, with Charles Wallace scholarship.

Born of Kannada and Punjabi parents, a Delhiite, who had a highly stressful job at Wall Street in 2000, an accomplished painter with a few successful shows in New York, wrote two books in succession, utilizing time that lay in between signing of contract of her first book and its final publication, which was five long years. A literary journey for this Harvard Graduate began with `The Three Of Us' in 2000, she came out with her second, `Babyji', after five years which fetched some awards. With her politically- correct sounding latest title Family Values, you cannot undermine her capacity to experiment. She knows the pulse of what her readers demand.

Her previous novel 'That Summer in Paris' is sprinkled with technology, gadgets, geeks and of course the beauty of Paris, with its food streets, art galleries and people, readers would relate to. It revolves around Prem Rustum, an ageing literary luminary of Indian origin in America, his friendship with a fellow stalwart of a writer, the French Pascal, and his attraction to a budding writer on a fellowship in Paris, Maya. Rustum follows Maya to Paris, of course keeping a tab on her through E-mails. The book takes readers through a number of absorbing situations. To get true portrayal of an older man in love, Abha interviewed a lot of aged men on their personal lives to get Rustum right. She used photographs, blogs and all other technological assistance required to lend the book a real feel. The book released by Random House in India is a great success.

Was barely in her graduate school when she started writing her first novel, The Girl, which was published by Penguin Viking in 2005. She studied history at St Stephen's College, New Delhi, and was noticed for her brilliance in writing skills.

She was reporting for India Today and Tehelka magazine. It was during her reporting days, when she met Leela, a beautiful and charismatic bar dancer with a story to tell that her second book was conceptualized. Leela introduced Sonia to the underworld of Bombay's dance bars: a world of glamorous women, of fierce love, sex and violence, of customers and gangsters, of police, prostitutes and pimps.

Leela's pride and independence faced its greatest test when the bars were closed down by ambitious politicians under the garb of morality. Thus came Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (Penguin, India, 2010), a work of narrative non- fiction, based on five years of her research in Bombay's dance bars, Beautiful Thing was declared Subcontinental Book of the Year 2010 by Time Out magazine, and was described as 'One of the most original works of non-fiction from India in years.' Sonia has contributed to several anthologies, among them AIDS Sutra: Hidden Stories from India. The Guardian described her essay in AIDS Sutra as 'urgent and stark.' Fiction is not the only genre that sells well, many well reaserched books about India, and its fascinating mozaic sell like hot cakes.

Since David Godwin made forays into Indian writer's wonderland, by discovering Booker Award winner Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai, literary agents from the first world have been making a beeline for the young writers of the third world. In the last few years a few indigenous agents have come up; Red Ink, a literary agency at Bahri Sons in Khan Market, New Delhi, Osian's The Art Foundation, and Banglore based Jacaranda Press to name a few. With emergence of professional agents, Indian writers writing in English have begun to get the price they deserve. Language publishers, on the other hand, in the absence of agents are known to pay meagre royalties on their titles - sometimes as low as five per cent on the cover price. Moreover, since royalties are calculated on the number of copies sold, authors are often left guessing about how many copies of his or her work have actually been sold, to tally it with the amount dished out by the publisher as annual royalty.

Currently an established author is given between 10 and 20 per cent of the royalties by well- established publishing houses. Writers have to part with an affixed amount for an agent's services, which is, in fact a pittance, considering that they leave very few hassles for the authors to deal with. Not all publishers offer an advance for writing a book, certainly not to the first timers, but, when they do, the amount is sizeable.

Foreign agents can be contacted through their web-sites. They often ask for first chapter of a book to sample writing.. 

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Naxal woman commander held
BHOPAL: A Naxal woman commander wanted in more than 45 cases of murder, arson and looting in Madhya Pradesh was arrested on Sunday from Lanji area in Balaghat district, close to the Chhattisgarh border. Jhinia Pusam (32) was wanted for the 1999 murder of former Madhya Pradesh Transport Minister Lakhiram Kaware. — PTI

Malegaon blast
MALEGAON: In the light of a confession by Swami Aseemanand, the CBI will re-examine all evidence in the Malegaon blast case and has decided to depute a special team to the city to conduct a fresh probe in the case. The investigating agency also plans to examine the role of officials of the Maharashtra Anti-Terror Squad, which had chargesheeted nine persons in the case, and re-visit their investigations into the case. — PTI