“The training coupled with our steely resolve has led us to where we are today -- confident and proud”  There is nothing unusual about Jusmi Tudu, a 48-year-old woman from Santhal tribe in Jharkhand. Not even her uniform -- a blue shirt and trousers. But when she begins to tell you of her metamorphosis from a sari-clad, unskilled worker to an award-winning senior technician who works for Tata Steel, you...

Saying that the biotech bill is all 'wrong and retrogressive', Communist Party of India (CPI) leader D. Raja has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cautioning him not to introduce the 'draconian' bill in parliament. In the letter dated March 11, of which IANS has a copy, the party's national secretary vehemently criticised the bill's main proposal to set up the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) under the ambit of...

Once India sold poverty to foreigners; now it’s being asked to export its top anti-poverty scheme. Five foreign governments have asked the Centre to help them replicate the rural job scheme in their countries, officials have said. South Africa was the first to have shown interest in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), India’s “cushion for poor people’’ in the words of the World Bank. The other four too are African...

YELLING dementedly, seven lawmakers mobbed the chairman of the Indian parliament’s upper house on March 8th and tore at the document, containing the women’s reservation bill, he was reading from. Yet the bill passed the next day, with the two-thirds majority needed to change India’s constitution. With broad political support, including from the Congress party that leads India’s coalition government and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the bill...

The lesson from the rest of the world is that seat reservation for women to merely increase their representation in the legislature will not do; they need to be empowered in the real sense.  During the debate in Parliament and outside over the Women's Reservation Bill, many people have referred to quota “success stories” worldwide — proposing that India could gain from the experience of about 40 other countries that...