women will soon be able to avail themselves of a single window service for all programmes run by the government for them under a new national mission for empowerment of women. Minister of State for women and Child Development Krishna Tirath said on Tuesday the mission would help make development programmes easily accessible to women from all sections of society. She was talking to journalists on the sidelines of the Dalit...

India will become the world’s most populous country in 2025, surpassing China, where the population will peak one year later because of declining fertility, according to United States Census Bureau projections released Tuesday. The bureau suggests that the projected peak in China, 1.4 billion people, will be lower than previously estimated and that it will occur sooner. With the fertility rate declining to fewer than 1.6 births per woman in this...

The number of sex workers in the country may touch a whopping five million in just a few years, if the world's oldest profession is legalized as suggested by the Supreme Court, warn activists. Hearing a PIL by NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan about large scale child trafficking, the apex court had last week said that if the trade can't be curbed through punitive measures, legalizing it would be a better...

For generations of China watchers, Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea was an objective interpreter of the tumultuous events which unfolded in the Peoples’ Republic.  Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea was one of the world’s leading scholars on China, a political scientist who skirted the minefield that her subject’s often fraught relations with India laid before her peers with integrity, wit and an objectivity of consideration rare in the field of Sinology. Taking to academia at...

For a country looking to reap its demographic dividend when most other economies would be struggling to cope with ageing populations, the health of India’s under-five population should be a huge concern. Almost half (48%) of children under the age of five are stunted, or too short for their age, and 43% are underweight, according to the National Family Health Survey of 2005-06 (NFHS-3). The primary cause, finds the survey,...