Dear reader,

The World Health Organisation recommends that any given population should have one dentist for every 7,500 people. By one calculation, India has one for every 5,000 people. By another, it has one for every 6,500.

Yet, across the country, millions of people struggle to access basic oral healthcare. A key reason for this is that dentists are not distributed evenly across the population. Data from the Indian Dental Association suggests that in rural areas, their density is as low as one for every 200,000 people.

This has grave implications for the oral health of Indians, and for the detection and treatment of serious conditions, such as oral cancer. The mouth, as one dentist put it, "is the gateway to one's overall health", and good oral healthcare can also ensure early detection of other life-threatening diseases.

In Common Ground this week, Johanna Deeksha writes on the steep price that India pays for neglecting oral health. Read the story here.

You can find previous Common Ground stories here. 

And you can support more such in-depth and investigative reporting by making a contribution to the Scroll Ground Reporting Fund.

Ajay Krishnan
Contributing Editor