India’s story in the global gender gap review is a little good news followed by a lot of bad news. The good news first: The 73rd (Panchayat) amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1993, has brought over one million women at the grassroots into the political system. Another shining indicator relates to the female head of government. Sixteen of the last 50 years were occupied by a female in the...

Interview with Joan Mencher, an anthropologist who has worked in India for long on issues such as agriculture, ecology and caste.   JOAN P. MENCHER is a Professor emerita of Anthropology from the City University of New York’s Graduate Centre and Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is the chair of an embryonic not-for-profit organisation, The Second Chance Foundation, which works to support rural grass-roots organisations...

An open collision of ideas about global warming at the release of the UNFPA report, “The State of World Population 2009” has generated enough heat to raise the tempers. (See the report’s URL below) While the Minister of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh, who released the report in New Delhi, agreed that the women of the world would be forced to bear the disproportionate burden of climate change, he questioned...

Women in developing countries will be the most vulnerable to climate change, a report from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has warned. The agency said there was a disproportionate burden on those women and called for greater equality. They do most of the agricultural work, and are therefore affected by weather-related natural disasters impacting on food, energy and water, it said. Slower population growth would help cut greenhouse gas...

For the UNFPA Laadli Media Awards for Gender Sensitivity CHANDIGARH: “It is a sad reality that even today the girl child is unwanted and often murdered in the womb and the increased presence of science in our lives has fuelled this evil instead of decreasing it,” said UNFPA-Laadli Media Awards for Gender Sensitivity regional coordinator Minu Talwar at a press conference here. Inviting entries for the second UNFPA-Laadli Media Awards for...