-The Hindu Women continue to face discrimination in terms of owning assets like land and payment of wages, accessing credit, technology, market and irrigation facilities Hyderabad: Such is the gender bias that even when her spouse commits suicide forced by agrarian crisis, the woman farmer is left to fend for herself. Even as they keep breaking the proverbial glass ceiling to move up the corporate ladder and make a mark virtually in every...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Modi government tries hard to signal a makeover but beyond the symbolic it does not change much. Budget 2016 is not important for the proposals that it has made but for what it tries to signal about the proposed makeover, in a limited way, of the Narendra Modi government. The budget does try hard to claim that the Modi government is not a “suit-boot” administration, an image...

-The Indian Express Gamlina’s response is just one example of how distant this government is from the lives of the poor and how tokenistic its schemes are. Gamlina Soren, an elected panchayat member in Jharkhand, sounded upset. She had been told by a local BJP functionary that gas cylinders were going to be “gifted” to poor women by the Centre but that they must have a BPL card. “But most poor Adivasi...

-The Indian Express We need to make goat farming organised, tie it to agriculture and animal husbandry. This is an apocryphal story, but it is bizarre enough to be true. Once every four or five years, we have a livestock census. The latest one is the 19th, for 2012. This anecdote is about the 2007 version. In a village in West Bengal, there were 31 geese — 17 male, 14 female. An...

-The Hindu If the Indian government is serious about its commitment to realise the rights of its citizens to universal and equitable health care, it cannot ignore rare diseases. The draft National Health Policy, 2015, makes no mention of them Rare diseases are a diverse set of over 7,000 different conditions that afflict an estimated 1 in 20 Indians and 350 million people worldwide. Put simply, it means that every bus on...