-The Hindu Business Line Ahmedabad: Gender-based discrimination leads to greater neglect of girls, in turn leading to malnourishment and retardation in female children, explained experts at the Jaipur-based IIHMR University recently. Experts and academicians from the university revealed that as much as 56 per cent of girls aged between 15 and 19 suffer from anaemia. Commenting on the National Girl Child Day, Goutam Sadhu, Associate Professor and in-charge, School of Rural Management at...

-The Hindu Business Line By allowing children to work in family enterprises, amendments to the Child Labour Act have made them more vulnerable to exploitation. Tracking the issue will be more difficult, writes Preeti Mehra When the two houses of Parliament put their stamp on a few amendments to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986 a couple of months ago, they also signed away the dignity of children and the...

-The Hindu An online community is prodding women to adopt eco-friendly methods such as reusable cloth pads and menstrualcups and reverse the reliance on the feminine hygiene product Remember the popular sanitary napkin advertisement that urged menstruating women to “touch the pickle”? While ad campaigns in the 1990s had a role in breaking certain taboos around menstruation, they also pushed a whole generation of adolescents into adopting sanitary napkins. Sanitary waste has...

-The Hindu The amendments to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, passed by Parliament recently, demonstrate a lack of national commitment to abolishing all forms of child labour. Instead of attempting an overhaul of legislation that has proved ineffective in curbing the phenomenon, Parliament has allowed children up to the age of 14 to be employed in ‘family enterprises’, and created a new category of ‘adolescents’ (the 14-18 age...

-Down to Earth It also says that the rate of rural Indian girls marrying before 18 years is twice that of their urban counterparts Child marriage is still common in India, with most Indian adolescents getting married before the age of 18, the latest report by prestigious medical journal The Lancet has revealed. The report, prepared by a Lancet “commission” made up of 30 experts from 14 countries, was released on May 11. The...