The National Food Security Bill, 2011, designed to make access to food a legal right, is the last chance to convert Gandhiji's vision of a hunger-free India into reality. What Mahatma Gandhi said of the role of food in a human being's life in a 1946 speech at Noakhali, now in Bangladesh, remains the most powerful expression of the importance of making access to food a basic human right. Gandhiji also...

-The Times of India   This is going to be a tough code of conduct. You can be imprisoned for impregnating your own wife. Worst, you could be branded as a `legally disqualified person'. This will be a reality if the Kerala Women's Code Bill 2011, submitted to the chief minister by a 12-member committee with Justice V R Krishna Iyer in the chair, is implemented in its letter and spirit. In a bid...

Despite a tortuous route marked by twists and turns, allegations and counter-allegations, amid public protests and fears of further violence in neighbouring Haryana, the Rohini sessions court which pronounced the judgment in the Mirchpur caste violence incident convicting 15 people and acquitting 82 others has set a record of sorts by completing the trial in just over nine months. On April 21, 2010, 70-year-old Tara Chand and his physically-challenged daughter, Suman,...

The Planning Commission, headed by the prime minister, has filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court quantifying the daily poverty line for an adult as Rs 26 in rural, and Rs 32 in urban India. At today’s relentlessly increasing prices, Rs 26 will not get a manual worker even one nutritious meal a day — leave alone the 2,400 calories he is required to eat to enable him to work,...

-The Hindu Business Line About two-fifths are never born, one-fifth goes missing in infancy and childhood, and remaining two-fifths do so between the ages 15 and 59 There are close to 4 million “missing” poor women in developing countries each year, says a new World Bank report. India accounts for one million of these women. Expressing deep concern at excess female mortality or “missing” females, World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and...