-The United Nations   The global response to AIDS has achieved significant results since the first case was reported 30 years ago, with a record number of people having access to treatment and rates of new HIV infections falling by nearly 25 per cent, the United Nations says in a new report. “AIDS at 30: Nations at the crossroads,” released today by the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), comes ahead of...

AFTER MORE than a year’s debate on enumerating caste in Census 2011, it was finally decided in a Cabinet meeting on 19 May that all Indians would be asked their caste and religion along with their economic status. The caste census will be conducted as part of the ‘below poverty line’ (BPL) survey, to be carried out by the Ministries of Rural Development and Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation along...

Its population is expanding at breakneck speed, yet its schools are empty of girls Some call it India's "gendercide". In the past three decades up to 12 million unborn girls have been deliberately aborted by Indian parents determined to ensure they have a male heir. Once, parents desperate for a son achieved the same end by infanticide. But modern medical technology, and the complicity of the medical establishment, has sanitised the process...

The National Advisory Council has proposed a framework for the National Food Security Act. But its potential could be wasted by a flawed approach to the PDS. Two years have passed since the Central government announced that a draft National Food Security Act (NFSA) would be posted on the Food Ministry's website “very soon.” After prolonged deliberations, a detailed framework for this Act has recently been proposed by the National Advisory...

In the 1920s, a young Tamil girl sang and starred in her school musical. It was, ostensibly, a private event with few outsiders. Yet so exceptional was her singing that Swadesamitran ran her photograph and wrote about the event. Seeing that photo in the newspaper, her household “was appalled” for, as the music historian V Sriram writes, “good, chaste women never had their photographs published in papers”. Today, this seems like...