The National Advisory Council has asked the Centre to formulate a national policy to stem the declining sex ratio at birth that it believed was “located at the complex interface of the status of women in Indian society, patriarchal social mores and prejudice, spread and misuse of medical technology and the changing aspirations of urban and rural society”. The council’s draft recommendations — prepared by members Farah Naqvi and A.K. Shiva...

Rural secondary school students in the Northeast have better reading and arithmetic skills than the rest of the nation, an education survey has revealed, though the numerical knowledge in some states of the region is below the national average. The survey was conducted by volunteers of the Annual Status of Education Report under a Delhi-based NGO, Pratham, for the Union human resource development ministry. Among the Northeast states, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland,...

Here is a new set of official statistics that can escalate the politically contentious debate on what constitutes the poverty line. If the average monthly consumption expenditure is taken as the benchmark of what an individual needs to survive, the poverty linewould be Rs 66.10 for urban areas and Rs 35.10 for rural regions, while about 65% of the population will be below this cutoff. The figures, based on the 66th round...

-The Hindu The Rajya Sabha on Thursday passed a crucial Bill that extends the time limit from three to six years for providing reservation to the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes in the Central education institutions. The Bill also seeks to add a proviso that if there are Central educational institutions in a tribal area, the State seats in those institutions shall have reservation for the SCs,...

PROFESSOR Shamnad Basheer joined the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata, in November 2008 as the first Ministry of Human Resource Development Chaired Professor in Intellectual Property Law. Before this, he was Frank H. Marks Visiting Associate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the George Washington University law school and a research associate at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre (OIPRC).  He is the founder of several initiatives, including...