Word: uttar
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...This year's polio outbreak has been concentrated in India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, home to over 170 million people. It is here, say health workers, that a few ultraconservative Muslim clerics have spread a myth that the polio vaccine is part of an underhanded campaign to sterilize Muslim children and lower the Muslim birth rate. Dr Hamid Jafari, the regional advisor for the World Health Organization (WHO) on polio eradication, says that the majority of Uttar Pradesh's Muslims have got their children vaccinated, but, "in certain places, fatwas have been issued against the vaccine." In those places...
...Jafari adds that paranoia is not the only reason for the hostility to the polio drops. Uttar Pradesh is notorious for being one of the worst-administered regions of India, and most of the state has appallingly bad hospitals and health services. Muslims, who are among the poorest of Indians, bear the brunt of this collapse in the state's health infrastructure. Dr Jafari says: "There's a sense of frustration among many Muslims: they tell the health workers, we've never seen anyone coming to take care of us, why are you coming just to give us polio drops...
...poorer north are accused of covering it up. Last year India surpassed South Africa as the country with the world's highest HIV/AIDS population, with 5.127 million people infected. And yet by April last year, two of India's most populous states, Bihar (population 88 million) and Uttar Pradesh (population 166 million), were claiming respectively to have just 155 and 1,383 cases of HIV or AIDS. Experts say the figures simply aren't epidemiologically possible. The World Bank calls India's AIDS statistics "unreliable," and Richard Feachem, executive director of the Globan Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria...
Bodh Gaya has benefited the most, but the pilgrim business, like a magic wand, is transforming places all along the Buddhist circuit. Kushinagar, in Uttar Pradesh, appears at first glance to be another no-hope town: many of the sugar mills that employed the townspeople have recently closed, and unemployment is rampant. Yet the town is seeing a real estate boom, roads are markedly better than anywhere around and children go to well-maintained schools. Kushinagar is where the Buddha died, and pilgrims come to see the gilded statue that commemorates the spot where the Buddha attained nirvana as well...
...They charge that it impugns their ancestor's character, and they're seeking nominal damages from the director, screenwriter, producer and two co-stars. The lawsuit came after the film had already been blasted by critics and academics, as well as by indignant politicians from Pandey's home state, Uttar Pradesh. In fact, so many people have attacked the film, and for so many different reasons, that it's become an intriguing piece of history itself...