-The Hindu ‘Appreciative mechanisms for welfare of children living there could be replicated’. The social audit report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), which exposed the sexual abuse of 34 minor girls at a State-run shelter home in Muzaffarpur, has also pointed out that there are at least seven shelter homes that could, in fact, be models for other such institutions in the State. The 100-page TISS report has not been...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Delhi government will soon undertake a drive to identify all street vendors across the city and create a database. The survey will be carried out by recently formed town vending committees (TVCs), which were elected by street vendors and hawkers themselves. TVCs, which will work for the rights of the vendors and create permanent vending zones, also have representatives of the NGOs working for street...

-Livemint.com Odisha is a front-runner in women’s land ownership, much of it owing to government policies from the 1980s. But has ownership led to empowerment? Surrounded by sun-drenched paddy fields interspersed with jackfruit and banana trees, Sanakusupadu is a hamlet in Odisha’s tribal-dominated district of Rayagada. Here, almost every married woman owns land. No matter how small the holding, land documents of the 62 households in this village bear the names of the...

-Livemint.com It is important to give preference to those approaches that help the poor the most for every rupee spent, no matter how they are labelled Sometimes in life, it is clear that the direct approach isn’t the best one. This is true in many areas, even when it comes to policymaking. Take, as an example, the area of extreme poverty. It seems logical, at first, that the most effective response should...

-Civil Society News New Delhi: In 1974, Dr Samir Chaudhuri, a paediatrician working in Kolkata’s slums, founded Child in Need Institute (CINI) to tackle the many dimensions of child malnutrition. It struck him at the time that malnutrition wasn’t just a clinical problem but a complex phenomenon rooted in gender issues. Over the years, led by Dr Chaudhuri, CINI developed deep understanding of the social, economic and political underpinnings of malnutrition...