The government intends to give the oldest child welfare programme a fresh lease of life through new technology. It proposes to use mobile phones to monitor its food programme directed at children between the years of 0-6. The ministry of women and child development (WCD) will use mobile phones to monitor the integrated child development scheme (ICDS) and spread awareness on nutrition and sanitation. The issue will be discussed in...

Describing female foeticide as a “disgrace” to society, President Pratibha Patil has called upon the medical fraternity to ensure that diagnostic tests are not misused for pre-natal gender determination. “We have laws and legal provisions that specially prohibit medical practitioners from disclosing the gender of the foetus. It is not only illegal, but it is socially immoral and detrimental to society. It is very important that all medical facilities, doctors and...

The class bias in government policy is clear in the decision to release a small amount of foodgrain in the open market to tackle inflation. MOST people would agree that there is a strong element of speculation underlying the current inflation and that forward trading contributes to it. Yet the government, though it has banned forward trading in certain commodities under public pressure, is curiously reluctant to see this point....

The term ‘money laundering’ is said to have originated from mafia ownership of Laundromats in the US. Gangsters there were earning huge sums in cash by extortion, prostitution, gambling and bootleg liquor. They needed to show a legitimate source for these monies. Money launderers now resort to the use of apparently legitimate commercial transactions to camouflage their laundering activities. There has been an increasing amount of interest of late in commodity...

I remember being disturbed enough to stop watching the 2003 Hindi movie Matrubhumi(motherland). Set in the future, it depicted an Indian village populated only by men. It gets that way after a man, yearning for a boy, publicly drowns his newborn girl in a vat of milk, sparking a custom that wipes out women. So the men watch porn, fornicate with farm animals. A father marries his five sons to...