-The Hindu Other States in India can study how the family planning programme has worked in Kerala and incorporate those features in their own programmes The recent tragedy of several women losing their lives in the state-sponsored tubectomy camp in Takhatpur, Chhattisgarh, has caused severe damage to the national family planning programme. This, however, is not an invalidation of the importance of sterilisation as an integral part of the programme, but only...

Child sex ratio (CSR) in India has declined from 927 in 2001 to 918 in 2011 (girls per 1,000 boys), according to a new report entitled Missing Girls: Mapping the Adverse Child Sex Ratio in India (Census 2011). Of the total 640 districts in the country, 429 districts have experienced decline in CSR (see the link below).   Of these 429 districts, 26 districts exhibited drastic decline (of 50 points or more),...

-The Telegraph Guwahati: Apart from Tripura and Sikkim, enrolment for Aadhaar cards remains very low in the northeastern states, with Assam at the bottom of the list. According to figures available with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which handles the Aadhaar project, as on November 30, 2014, the percentage of enrolment against the total population was abysmally low in Assam - 0.3 per cent. The trend is not much better in...

-The Hindustan Times The editor, a liberal man, is taken aback by my question. "I don't hire people on the basis of their caste but their ability," he informs me when I ask how many Dalits he has in his newsroom. Nearly 70 years after Independence, my question should have been irrelevant. But a caste survey by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the University of Maryland, United States,...

-The Hindu Only un-electrified households will be entitled to subsidised fuel New Delhi: Attacking the subsidy regime, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has scrapped the supply of subsidised kerosene through the Public Distribution System (PDS). The Centre plans to write to States asking them to provide subsidised kerosene only to un-electrified households. States which have achieved near 100 per cent electrification will be incentivised to become kerosene-free, a Finance Ministry source told...