Vina Mazumdar refers to herself as "grandmother" of women's studies in India. She was secretary of the Committee on Status of Women in India that brought out the first report on condition of women in the country, Towards Equality. She was co-founder of Centre for Women's Development Studies, an institution that has influenced the course of women's studies in India. Quite the firebrand even today at 80, she is disarmingly...

The Union home ministry has rejected the Bengal government’s request for a caste-based census. “Census 2011 will tabulate population of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes, as has been done in the past. However, it will not collect caste-based data on others,” junior home minister Ajay Maken said. The population count is set to begin this April. Several organisations had asked for a caste-based count, but the Bengal dispensation was the only...

Statistical poverty lines should not become real-life eligibility criteria for food entitlements.  Nothing is easier than to recognise a poor person when you see him or her. Yet the task of identifying and counting the poor seems to elude the country's best experts. Take for instance the “headcount” of rural poverty — the proportion of the rural population below the poverty line. At least four alternative figures are available: 28...

The introduction of many new social welfare schemes could be delayed because the rural development ministry and the Planning Commission have yet to agree on a suitable new way to identify the poor, the main intended beneficiaries of these schemes. One key programme that is likely to be hit is the proposed National Food Security Act, which aims to provide every Indian family that lives below the poverty line (BPL) 25kg...

Issues today have to be dressed up in ways certified by the corporate media. They have to be justified not by their importance to the public but by their acceptability to the media, their owners and sponsors.  That the terrible tragedy in Pune demands serious, sober coverage is a truism. One of the side-effects of the ghastly blast has been unintended, though. The orgy of self-congratulation that marked the media...