With nearly 800 million people unable to read or write, the United Nations today marked International Literacy Day with a warning that illiteracy undermines efforts to eliminate a host of social ills such as poverty and sickness and threatens the very stability of nations. “The costs are enormous,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message. “Illiteracy exacerbates cycles of poverty, ill-health and deprivation. It weakens communities and undermines democratic processes through...

Each day, one thousand women die in childbirth and one million people become infected with sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including 7,000 cases of HIV. Yet these numbers are preventable, experts insist, when countries possess the resources and willpower to address and deal with them. Dignitaries and high-level officials gathered this week to discuss reproductive health commodity security (RHCS), or, simply put, ensuring that people have access to essentials of reproductive health...

-The Business Standard   The poor progress made by states in stemming the declining sex ratio (of the number of girls in the 0-6 age group for every 1,000 boys) in the country has prompted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to write to the 28 state chief ministers on the issue. The recent census showed a decline in states which had earlier not reported one. This had prompted a high-level meeting in the Prime...

In the name of God, hapless girls are still being made to become devadasis which in stark terms means being raped by the priests, secretly auctioned to brothels and finally dying of AIDS. Deebashree Mohanty speaks to a few of these unfortunate women who died everyday of their life for a farce called service of the God I was nine when I got married to my village deity Yellamma. The mahajan,...

The absence of a law regulating surrogacy makes India, especially Anand, a top destination for couples from abroad. UNTIL about 2008, the future looked bleak for Sharadaben Solanki. A landless daily-wage worker in Anand, Gujarat, she earned a paltry Rs.600 a month. Her husband earned an equal amount working as a construction labourer. Together the couple supported three children and their parents. That was when she heard from Maganbhai, the owner of...