-Livemint.com After being on the sidelines of Dalit and feminist movements for long, Dalit women are now standing up for their rights New Delhi: In 2008, seven women, aged 19-24, walked into a police station in Haryana’s Indri village in Kurukshetra district. Dressed in salwar-kameez with dupattas draped around their necks, they looked tired but confident, angry and brimming with questions. They wanted to meet the SHO and ask why no FIR...

-Down to Earth A study conducted in public health centres in Uttar Pradesh shows complying to essential childbirth practices did not significantly alter maternal and perinatal mortality & maternal morbidity Despite improvements in the quality of care during labour and delivery, checklists and coaching interventions failed to reduce maternal and neonatal deaths during childbirth, shows a study published on December 14 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study was conducted...

-The Indian Express The advertisement industry itself is no stranger to innuendo and double entendre – and it is a blatant hypocrisy to make advertisements for condoms the scapegoat in this issue. India’s reproductive health is the unsuspecting casualty in the recent tussle on the appropriateness of condom advertisements. The advisory issued by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting on Monday, December 11, directs television channels to restrict the broadcast of condom...

-Hindustan Times Close to half, or 48%, of pregnancies were unintended and 0.8 million women used unsafe methods for an abortion, putting their health and lives at risk. New Delhi: One in three of 48.1 million pregnancies in India ended in an abortion, according to the country’s first large-scale study on abortions and unintended pregnancies that accounted for 2015 data. The country recorded around 15.6 million abortions in 2015, reports the study published...

-Frontline.in The Assembly elections have put under intense scrutiny Narendra Modi’s Gujarat model of development which is touted as worthy of replication throughout the country. Audit reports of the CAG provide ample evidence of it being inefficient, corrupt and not beneficial to the common people. THE standard indicators of development, as is understood in theory and practice, comprise a range of indices, and not necessarily the level of private investment in...