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Drawing on ethnography of one family's life with diabetes in a poor settlement in Delhi's suburbs, this paper examines the relationship between emotional structures of care and kinship in the face of chronic illness. While anthropologists have argued for a relational understanding of care and discussed how, in India, modernity and social transformations have resulted in crises of familial care, less attention has been paid to the emotional terrains of care and its difficulties as they unfold in concrete relationships over time. This paper demonstrates how emotional intensities define the possibilities, limits, and ambivalence of kin care for the chronically ill. Described as care without heart, this mode of attention implies a continuation of care labour that maintains kinship ties and holds the possibility of kin futures, but is disinvested emotionally and feels unsatisfactory. The analytic of care without heart expresses a particular mode of care by which persons navigate dominant moral regimes around gendered family responsibilities and imperatives of love in relationships, but without fully subscribing to them. Care without heart at once signifies an inadequate form of care, invokes North Indian normative moral regimes around family care responsibilities and emotions, and acknowledges the shortcomings of these regimes and norms of relatedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This paper aims to understand the recent trends and correlation of tobacco use and factors associated with an attempt to quit smokeless tobacco (SLT) use among adults from Northeast India. Methods: We used data from two rounds of the cross-sectional Global Adult Tobacco Survey. The paper applied proportion test statistics to examine the change in the prevalence of tobacco use between the two periods. Binary logistic regression was applied to determine the associated risks of tobacco use. Results: Prevalence of SLT use among adults increased significantly by 3.9% from 2009-10 to 2016–17. In the same period, the prevalence of smoking had declined by 2.4%. Increase in use of SLT use was more prominent among women and illiterate adults, rural and poor households, while a decrease in prevalence of smoking was observed among adults. A significant proportion of educated people, students, and homemakers, reported that they had quit smoking; however, the proportion of attempts to quit SLT had increased significantly among older adults, rural residents, and those with low education levels. Conclusions: Actions involving the community, youth, women, the less educated and poor adults are necessary to encourage them quit SLT use and smoking in the north-eastern states of India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of household wealth dynamic remains an important methodology in the identification of poverty traps. To overcome measurement issues in survey data, livelihoods-based approaches of the dynamics of poverty are typically examined using panel regressions of a livelihoods regression on household assets and other socio-economic factors over time. In this paper, we characterise the livelihoods regression as a 'livelihoods technology', and use a latent class-technology approach to account for heterogeneity in how households generate a livelihood. We use a detailed dataset from rural India covering 213 households across 2001–2014, and control for selection issues through a Heckman Selection model. Our results are the first in the wealth dynamics literature to show that substantial heterogeneity exists in the technologies with which households generate their livelihoods. Importantly, we show that accounting for heterogeneity in household livelihoods 'technologies' more readily identifies different equilibria in wealth levels and provides previously foregone information on who is poor and why they remain poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study by a non-profit organisation implementing a community-based urban adolescent development programme. The study highlights the sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) situation of marginalised young women in a developed state of India. Our findings, based on in-depth interviews with young women and frontline health providers, show that structural factors, such as economic and social stratifiers, gender norms and cultural beliefs, result in further marginalisation of young women. In turn, marginalisation adversely affects the realisation of SRHR through discriminatory practices around menstruation and lack of control in matters related to sexuality, contraception, pregnancy and safe abortion. Rights to the highest standards of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) care are compromised. Health system factors like providers' attitudes and knowledge, commodity supplies, and indifference to ensuring delivery of contraceptives and other services often result in unplanned pregnancies and affect the quality of young women's SRH care. Whatever information and support adolescents and young women get is from local community-based organisations. We conclude that structural determinants and violations of fundamental rights to education, equal opportunities and participation constitute a significant barrier to the enjoyment of SRHR by the marginalised young women in the study. Unless these are addressed, government policies and programmes to promote young people's SRHR will not benefit young women from disadvantaged communities. Partnership and complementarity between government programmes, adolescents and health rights civil society organisations are recommended to promote rights-based, equitable adolescent and youth-friendly services to this vulnerable population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, the "feminization of aging" is one of the areas in which prejudice most frequently occurs. Noticeably, poverty, isolation, changes in residential care, and weak institutional support push women into several vulnerabilities. This study demonstrates that elderly women are often denied basic rights and are compelled to reside in old-age homes; the situation is worse for elderly widowed women. We examine the claims that the lives of elderly women are more precarious due to their lower literacy, limited social exposure, and monetary dependence. Being women, old, and widowed, they are affected by triple vulnerabilities that require concrete policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]