The Union health ministry registered only 107 cases of female feticide under Section 315 and 316 of IPC in 2010. This is an abysmally low figure in a country which scientists believe has seen over 10 million female lives lost to abortion and sex selection in the past two decades. A few years ago, an Indo-Canadian scientist had reported in the Lancet that pre-natal selection and selective abortion was causing a...

Rising from ashes, Bihar is India's new phoenix. Recently it impressed the World Bank resulting in an aid worth several hundred crores for development of the state. And it has a number of lessons for neighbouring UP. In 2002-03, when census data was notified, UP fared better than Bihar. But, now the tortoise (read Bihar) has metamorphosed to hare, leaving UP behind. Consider figures from the National Rural Health Mission. Number...

Eighty labourers, both men and women, are at work at Thiruvanduthurai village in Tiruvarur district of Tamil Nadu, about 325 km south of Chennai. They are digging a pond - about an acre wide and six feet deep - funded under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, or MGNREGS. Outside the work perimeter, two middle aged men look on, worried. P. Murugan and K. Govindaraj are farmers from the...

Budget 2011-12 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. THREE decades ago, in the early years of the Special Component Plan (SCP) for Scheduled Castes – very recently renamed inappropriately as Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) – Indira Gandhi on her return as Prime Minister wrote two historical D.O. letters dated March 12, 1980, one to Central Ministers and the other to State Chief Ministers, regarding the SCP in the Central...

Over the last couple of years, the Delhi government's budgets had focussed largely on beefing up the city's physical infrastructure in time for the Commonwealth Games. With the Games over, the budget for 2011-12, the first presented by Sheila Dikshit, shifted focus to social infrastructure with welfare measures in health and education targetted at the school-going. Welfare measures apart, the budget cited environmental concerns to hike taxes on diesel vehicles and...