Only 12% of India's 355 million menstruating women use sanitary napkins (SNs). Over 88% of women resort to shocking alternatives like unsanitised cloth, ashes and husk sand. Incidents of Reproductive Tract Infection (RTI) is 70% more common among these women. Inadequate menstrual protection makes adolescent girls (age group 12-18 years) miss 5 days of school in a month (50 days a year). Around 23% of these girls actually drop out of school after...

Like Kerala’s Kasaragod, neighbouring Dakshina Kannada is bearing the brunt of spraying of endosulfan. While Kasaragod grabbed media spotlight and Kerala banned the pesticide, victims in Karnataka are still struggling for recognition. Karnataka chief minister B S Yeddyurappa in December announced that his government would consider banning endosulfan. The highly toxic pesticide is banned in over 70 countries. The assurance has come too late and is too little for the hundreds of...

There is more trouble in store for South Korean steel maker Posco’s Orissa project. Shoreline surveys have found the state’s coastline to be highly erosive. Worse still, 50%, that is 4.8 km of the 9.3 km coastline along the proposed captive port site at Jatadhari is eroding. This is likely to put a spanner in the works for the South Korean company, which has been insistent on a separate captive...

‘For the Indian media, the key question is one of covering mass deprivation' Time to rediscover concept of freedom of press in Marxist terms: Sashi Kumar N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, has called for “bold and radical” ways to check the ethical failings of the media. Inaugurating a seminar ‘Whither Media,' organised as part of the three-day Third International Congress on Kerala Studies, which concluded here on Monday, Mr. Ram said that...

Safai karmacharis are set to end their two-decade-long movement for a life of dignity on a victorious note. DECEMBER 31, 2010. As revellers across the world prepare to celebrate the end of the first decade of the new millennium and the start of a new year, a million women across India will be celebrating not the end of a calendar year but the end of a centuries-old degrading and inhuman...