Urban India's greatest comforts are the cause of a super-size health problem: obesity. Easy access to high-calorie packaged foods, sedentary lifestyles and a predilection for gizmos have resulted in almost 70% Indians in mega-cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore or Chennai being overweight or obese, says a new multi-city survey. The profiling of 46,000 urban Indians-all of whom have access to the internet-showed that 49% were obese or had a...

Maharashtra has been struggling with a declining child sex ratio and is ranked among the five worst states in the country. The reasons are the same as elsewhere: preference for a male child. But in a shocking indicator of how extreme this desire is and how deep-rooted the bias against the girl child can get, scores of families across Maharashtra have simply named their daughters ‘Nakushi’ or ‘Nakusha’—meaning ‘unwanted’ in...

“That space on the wall, that is the cradle, the first stop to the Unique Home,” says a playful four-year-old girl pointing to a shelf built into the boundary wall of the home. An alarm is set off when a newborn girl is placed there, marking the beginning of celebrations on the arrival of yet another addition to Parkash Kaur's Unique Home at Jalandhar in Punjab. Mother of 60 adopted girls,...

-The United Nations   A new report by the United Nations labour agency warns of a youth jobs crisis in both developed and developing countries, with Young people aged 15 to 24 finding it increasingly difficult to obtain decent employment and future prospects are dim. As it released its “Global Employment Trends for Youth: 2011 Update,” the International Labour Organization (ILO) notes that the recent global economic crisis led to a “substantial” increase...

Rudrapur, an industrial town in Uttarakhand, witnesses large-scale rioting and clashes of a communal nature. THE Garhwal and Kumaon regions, which constitute the tiny hill State of Uttarakhand, were totally free of communal disturbances even when the entire country was in the grip of tension following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 and the Mumbai blasts in 1993. These regions had always maintained communal peace. But on...