-India Today Taking a leap of unconventionality, a non-profit trust in collaboration with a local puja club based in north Kolkata will worship the very first transgender Durga idol on Panchami. In the 300-year-old history of Durga Puja in Bengal, this will the first time where devotees will worship a transgender Durga idol that has been fashioned after the androgynous form of Shiva and Parvati, Ardhanarishvara. Organised by the non-profit trust, Pratyay Gender...

-The Times of India The wheels of justice, the saying goes, grind slowly but grind exceedingly fine. In the Indian context, it would be more true to say that they grind so exceedingly slowly that there can be nothing fine about the outcome. When we set out to look at instances of gross miscarriage of justice, we found several cases where people were convicted of heinous crimes and locked up for...

-The Times of India DEHRADUN: The number of patients with 'severe mental disorders' has multiplied an astounding 100 times in the last three years in Uttarakhand — from 60 in 2012 to almost 7,000 today as per data compiled by the state health department. A large part of the quantum jump, say worried health officials, can be attributed to the devastating floods of 2013 that killed thousands and displaced lakhs, with...

-The Indian Express Decades of mismanagement have hobbled India’s mental health programme An event commemorating World Mental Health week opened at the WHO in Geneva this week. At a key session, the Disease Control Priorities project released its recommendations to governments to address the burden of mental disorders. This was timely for India, for few countries have witnessed so many high-profile debates related to mental health while ignoring the centrality of mental health...

-The Hindu The production of waste in India is growing at an exponential rate. However, the welfare and dignity of the informal workers involved in the Stigmatised sector of waste management remains at the bottom of any government’s political agenda. Human society has always produced waste and always will. Waste materials — substances without value — are constantly generated in all production, all distribution and all consumption processes. The time waste spends...