-The Hindu Doctors say there ought to be an audit of C-section deliveries in private and public health facilities In its new guidelines, the World Health Organization (WHO) has called for the elimination of the so-called ‘one-centimetre-per-hour’ benchmark — a rule of thumb that obstetricians use to determine whether a delivery requires surgical intervention. This is to counter what the body calls a “surge” in interventions such as caesarean sections that could...

-The Hindu A Supreme Court Bench will decide whether the law has to be interpreted expansively or in a narrow sense In July 2011, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government embarked on an ambitious project to rewrite the law on land acquisition. How the government acquired land from private parties had long been the subject of heated dispute, often resulting in violent conflict. Several previous governments had made attempts to amend the Land...

-The Times of India There is a saying in Harendragarh, a tribal village 50 km from Rajasthan’s Banswara town, that if a man eats the last rotla (chapatti) he will fall ill. So by default the last rotla, thinner than the rest and made from leftover dough along with the stale remains of the dal or vegetable made that day, would land on the plate of the woman of the house....

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The 2011 census brought Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan the ignominy of being the district with the lowest sex ratio of 837 girls per 1,000 boys among 33 districts of the state. Seven years on, the district is being hailed as a model with the sex ratio at birth (SRB) touching an impressive 955 girls per 1,000 boys. It is from here that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will...

-The Indian Express With a string of malnutrition deaths and now a case of lynching, Attappadi has for long lived in Kerala’s shadows. Shaju Philip on why, despite government schemes and projects, little has changed in the state’s only tribal block. C Valli slumps onto the floor of her unplastered house at Pazhayoor colony in Attappadi’s Chindakki village, clutching a plastic bag half filled with rice. “There’s not a grain at home....