-The Times of India MUMBAI: Abortions among teenage girls below the age of 15 in Mumbai have recorded an alarming 67% spike in 2014-15. Civic data accessed through an RTI further shows that out of nearly 31,000 women who opted for medical termination of pregnancy, 1,600 were below the age of 19. Health experts have called the trend of unwanted pregnancies alarming, while harping on the need for better sex education in...

-The Indian Express Niggling procedural hassles stymie efforts to modernise antiquated labour regulations.   As it completes one year in office, the NDA government seems to have finally bit the bullet and taken up the controversial Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, for amendments that would allow easier retrenchment and closure norms for firms with up to 300 workers though ensuring that the employees get higher compensation in return. The draft code on industrial relations has...

-Tehelka Shamefully, in India, a large percentage of the population still defecates in the open. However, a village in Tamil Nadu has scripted a rare success story by becoming an Open Defecation-Free Village. Nisha Ponthathil documents how the people of Amarambedu near Chennai triumphed over habit with a little help from the civil society Twenty-nine-year-old R Karthick, a resident of Amarambedu village, situated about 65 kilometres away from Tamil Nadu's capital Chennai,...

The India Country Report 2015 on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comes at a time when the Union Budget 2015-16 allegedly cut expenditure on several social sector schemes and programmes. This year's MDG country report says that India will fail to achieve two important targets pertaining to reducing hunger and maternal mortality by 2015, among others. Released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), the report says that India is...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: After Swachh Bharat and Make In India, the Modi government's big bang flagship scheme will be "Beti bachao, beti padhao'' that will bring much needed attention to the country's low child sex ratio. The scheme will be launched by PM Narendra Modi on January 22 and will focus on a multi-sectoral approach to tackling the problem of the vanishing girl child. A toilet in every girl's...