A new fund managed by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) today announced over $9 million in grants to support initiatives in 26 countries to empower women, ranging from boosting their political participation in Bosnia and Herzegovina to assisting those denied inheritance and property rights in Afghanistan. The Fund for Gender Equality is a $68 million multilateral initiative, currently funded by the Governments of Spain and Norway, designed...

A landless labourer dies on Christmas day after going without food for five days. Neither he nor his wife, who was a job card holder under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, knew they could demand work or avail of unemployment benefits as a right It was a death that could have been avoided. Kishen Singh, a 45-year-old landless labourer, died of hunger in Champakheda village in south Rajasthan. What...

The BJP has wrenched power in “yet another state”. The Congress is looking at long-term gains by refusing to back Shibu Soren. But the Jharkhand verdict has also opened the eyes of the two mainline parties to a disturbing realisation: their failure to “nurture” tribal leaders. “Both of us stand exposed as out-and-out upper caste parties who have failed to create, and worse, nurture tribal leadership. The mandate’s message is the...

The Centre on Tuesday informed the Supreme Court that the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act to provide free and compulsory education to children in the age group of 6 to 14 will be enforced in April/May after the Rules were put in place. Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam gave this assurance before a Bench of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan and Justice B.S. Chauhan hearing a petition filed by advocate M.C....

Much like the tsunami waves that devastated many coastal areas five years ago, the closing weeks of 2009 saw an ill wind sweeping across many of our democratic institutions, highlighting that beneath the veneer of the nation’s aspirations towards great power status was a crumbling institutional core. To look at the fourth estate first. The preface to the Press Council of India’s “Norms of Journalistic Conduct” has a section that...