I remember being disturbed enough to stop watching the 2003 Hindi movie Matrubhumi(motherland). Set in the future, it depicted an Indian village populated only by men. It gets that way after a man, yearning for a boy, publicly drowns his newborn girl in a vat of milk, sparking a custom that wipes out women. So the men watch porn, fornicate with farm animals. A father marries his five sons to...

The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council has decided to take its battle with the government on the now-controversial issue of food security into the public domain. Eight days after the Rangarajan panel, appointed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, rejected its recommendations on food security, the NAC has decided to dig in its heels, reflecting, council sources said, “Ms. Gandhi's determination to go ahead.” Indeed, on Friday, the NAC, at its ninth...

It was bad enough that the National Advisory Council in its recommendation of October 2010 proposed a food security Bill that diluted the principle of a universal right to food. It is appalling now that the C. Rangarajan Committee seeks to truncate that proposal, and legally establish a narrowly targeted public distribution system on the grounds of feasibility. Their argument is a false argument for more reasons than one. First,...

Rajasthan's Jatawali village hosts a debate on census showing how rural India badly needs state help. An old couple in Jatavali village in Choumu tehsil of Jaipur were having an early lunch at noon with their daughter. The man had a roti and a large chunk of crumpled baati (baked wheat balls) and a fairly large bowl of dal. He was making little cakes of baati, dipping them in the dal...

When a group of 46 cooks in northern Gujarat—some of whom had been working for up to seven years—demanded full payment for their labour, they were threatened, beaten, then finally thrown out with little more than the clothes they were wearing. The group—which included women and children—were all migrants from a tribal region in southern Rajasthan. They walked for three days without food to get to the nearest train station,...