West Bengal: Economic, Political and Social Issues

Globally, industrialization and urbanization are leading to improvement in society’s economic condition which is often accompanied by lifestyle changes including physical inactivity, unhealthy diet and harmful use of tobacco and alcohol. These altered lifestyles bring about non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like obesity, hypertension (HTN) and diabetes mellitus (DM). The risk factors of the lifestyle induced NCDs are measurable and largely modifiable. So, continuous surveillance on the levels and patterns of risk factors is of fundamental importance to control NCDs. Chapter 1 focuses on this and conducted a study on 1216 male individuals of different socio-economic status residing at Kolkata, West Bengal. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was initiated in India in 2006 with a view to creating more wage employment in rural areas thereby ameliorating rural poverty. But after the completion of more than a decade, the effects and roles of the scheme are found to be manifolds. Particularly, if we consider the impact of women. Chapter 2 looks at how the role of women have changed, especially in the family, and how that impacts society. In chapter 3, the authors performed a study to assess age trends in anthropometric measures and nutritional status among adult Mahali females. It was a community-based cross-sectional study, carried out in selected four villages of Bankura district, West Bengal, India.