Several recent reports put India at the bottom when it comes to gender equality. It is time for a clearly-spelt new policy on women and development. SHAILAJA CHANDRA  “By and large the attitude of a man towards his wife is possibly worse than his attitude towards his buffalo.”--Colin Gonzalves, Human Rights Lawyer The World Economic Forum, in a report titled the Global Gender Gap 2009, has quantified the magnitude of gender-based...

Bt brinjal is a genetically modified version of an eggplant that is injected with a protein that makes it immune to pests Kochi: There’s a new player in the fight against Bt brinjal, a village panchayat in Kerala that is seeking to preserve a traditional variety of eggplant. As part of the plans of the village-level elected legislative body, around 8,000 households in the Mararikulam North gram panchayat in the coastal...

The Union government’s decision to revive a long-forgotten concept of primary producers’ companies (PPCs) ought to be welcomed. Such companies can help small farmers and individual craftsmen come together to derive economies of scale. The idea of farmers’ companies which extend the benefit of being a registered firm while allowing farmers to derive all the benefits of agricultural land ownership, was mooted nearly a decade ago. After much debate, the...

Companies such as L&T, IL&FS, Dr Reddy’s and NIIT will soon train and employ youths from Below Poverty Line (BPL) families, based on the success of a pilot project in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, implemented under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). The National Rural Livelihoods Mission, to be taken to the Cabinet by the Rural Development Ministry soon, envisages the training of 1.1 lakh unskilled youth over the next...

Of indian households’ total annual income, 0.22 per cent is spent on buying newspapers — that is, if total national household annual income was Rs 100, 22 paise would be set aside for newspapers. Paying off bank loans (expenditure under equated monthly instalments) takes up 1.4 per cent of total household annual income. The share of health expenditure is 1.5 per cent, and that of education expenditure, 3.21 per cent....