-The Times of India There is good news and bad news on one of the key problems that haunts India - survival of the girl child. Sex ratio at birth, that is, the number of girls born for every 1000 boys born, has inched up from 906 to 909 between 2007 and 2013. This suggests that female feticide, the monstrous practice of killing off the girl baby in the mothers' womb...

-Pune Mirror Child rights activists demand that Centre amends Child Labour Act to ban children from working in the field Campaign Against Child Labour (CACL) submitted a charter of demands to Pune MP Anil Shirole to be raised in Parliament when the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Bill, 2014, comes up for discussion during the ongoing session. And, one of CACL's principal demands - perhaps the most important one -...

-The Hindu The clean-up of the plant is pending due to legal disputes Thirty years after India's worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, contamination owing to the leakage of poisonous gas from the Union Carbide pesticide factory continues to affect residents. The leak of 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate on the intervening night of December 2 and 3, 1984, killed thousands of people in its immediate aftermath and continued to kill people in the...

-The Hindu Business Line Questioning the kind of growth model pursued by the Government, civil society activists on Saturday called for a wider public debate on the reported move to curtail social sector spending on schemes such as the rural job guarantee scheme, MGNREGA, and for the HIV affected. "Considering the fact that the Government is forecasting a 5.3 per cent growth rate for this year, the social sector cuts in Budget...

-Press Release from Centre for Budget Analysis (CBGA) and Jan Awaaz New Delhi, 29 November 2014: There have been a number of media reports recently around possible cuts in Union Budget allocations for the current fiscal 2014-15 in case of social sector programmes, i.e. reductions in allocations in the Revised Estimates (RE) for 2014-15 as compared to the Budget Estimates (BE) that were made in July this year. This issue deserves...