-The Hindustan Times The country is ostensibly in the throes of a great social movement for sanitation. Gandhi's name is evoked, Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads from the front, ministers lift brooms for cameras, and officers, college and school children take oaths against littering and to clean their surroundings. Earlier the PM pledges in his Independence Day speech toilets for girls and boys in all schools. It appears that the squalor of...

The Right to Information Act, enacted in 2005, has been considered as the most effective tool in the hands of citizens to fight for transparency and accountability. However, there exists huge Gender gap in awareness and usage of RTI Act, finds the report entitled People's Monitoring of the RTI Regime in India 2011-13, released in October 2014 (please see the link below). Prepared by RTI Assessment and Advocacy Group (RaaG) and...

-The Hindu Just 2.3 per cent of rape was by men other than the husba Husbands commit a majority of acts of sexual violence in India, and just one per cent of marital rapes and six per cent of rapes by men other than husbands are reported to the police, new estimates show. In keeping with the widely held belief among women's rights activists in India that sexual violence is grossly under-reported, social...

-GRIST Media If hard work and enterprise inevitably made you prosperous, every rural woman would be a millionaire. These women have borne the brunt of the radical, often brutal transformation of rural India these past two decades. Our writers examine the hardships they continue to face as well as their remarkable vision to solve some of the greatest problems of our times such as food security, environmental justice and developing a...

-The Hindu Ignoring hunger and malnutrition will have significant costs to any country's development. Nutrition improvement has both intrinsic and instrumental value One of the disappointments in the post-reform period in India has been the slow progress in the reduction of malnutrition, especially with reference to the underweight among children. In fact, the rate of change in the percentage of underweight children has been negligible in the period 1998-99 to 2005-06; the...