-Economic and Political Weekly The government has notified a Draft Land Reforms Policy which, on paper, has all the requisites of an earnest programme. Yet, the near total failure of earlier efforts at land reforms in India leave little room for hope that something substantial will at last be done to combat landlessness. Harsh Mander (manderharsh@gmail.com) is with the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi, and works with survivors of mass violence,...

-FeministsIndia.com In the last six months or so the small community of feminist scholars cum activists has been hit by major losses: in February Lotika Sarkar who was among the signatories protesting the Mathura judgment that initiated a new and hugely important phase of the women’s movement passed away; at the end of May Vina Mazumdar who spearheaded the parallel women’s studies movement also passed away. But at least we had...

-IndiaResists.com The ongoing debate between two stalwart economists, Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, must be joined by those who understand contemporary realities and challenges in terms altogether different from those of mainstream economists. In a recent (July 27) article in Times of India, Bhagwati's co-author Arvind Panagariya characterizes the differences between the two in the following terms. Sen favours education and health measures as being the first steps to tackle poverty...

-The Times of India Amartya Sen is angry, and clearly getting impatient . Having urged Indian policymakers over decades to do more to combat poverty, hunger and illiteracy , the economist is now taking direct aim at what he feels is our continuing apathy as a nation towards the underprivileged. But in his own way - less the firebrand rhetorician and more the gentle but firm academic don that he is....

-Frontline India has persistently high rates of newborn mortality, over three lakh a year, and accounts for 29 per cent of all first-day deaths globally. MORE than one million babies die on the first day of life globally, making the first 24 hours the most dangerous day for babies in nearly every country. These are some of the key findings in Save the Children's 14th annual "State of the World's Mothers" report: Every...