-The Times of India RAIPUR: Even as Chhattisgarh witnessed around 1,500 incidents and 210 deaths of women assaulted for practices witchcraft in last few years, three women wait for justice after suffering assault, paraded naked, tonsured and forced to consume urine over similar accusations 13 years ago at Gariyaband's Lachkhera region. The women Teerath Bai, Shyama and Bisahin Bai had hit national headlines in October 2001 after they underwent torture by more...

-The Hindu Consent does not matter, says study A majority of parents who get their children married before the legal age do not even seek their consent, and among those who do, the child not consenting does not stop the marriage, new data has shown. In 2011, the Planning Commission selected the G.B. Pant Institute of Studies in Rural Development, Lucknow, for a study on child marriage in India. The 2005-06 National Family...

-The Indian Express Three members of a Dalit family in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar were killed, one of them decapitated before being thrown into a dry well in Jawkhede Khalsa village, on the night of October 20. The investigation is still on and the jury out on whether it was an act of caste violence or the result of a dispute. In recent times, however, it seems there is a surge in the...

-Down to Earth Health experts blame Centre's over-emphasis on women's sterilisation for the Chhattisgarh tragedy THERE WAS nothing right about the sterilisation camp held on November 8 in Chhattisgarh's Takhatpur block of Bilaspur district. An overambitious government doctor-with unsterilised equipment and virtually no manpower-set out to conduct laparoscopic tubectomy on 83 women in an abandoned private hospital. The mass sterilisation led to the death of 13 women and left others critically ill. They were...

-FirstPost.com The MGNREGA rural job programme and other social welfare schemess will take a significant hit due to the 15 percent budget cut that the ministry of finance is believed to have proposed recently, social activists said Saturday. "You (the government) cut fund allocations from social and development programmes and then talk of development. That is so wrong. Such notion is misplaced and insulting," said Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at...