HAS GREEN REVOLUTION FAILED INDIA'S POOR? Green Revolution Vs Rain-fed Farming OVERVIEW: Of late India’s fabled Green Revolution has come under severe attack. Many development thinkers believe that it has unfairly skewed India’s agriculture policy in favour of the farmers whose land is already or potentially covered under irrigation. The basic criticism is that the Green Revolution has been largely irrelevant for India’s 60 per cent cultivable land which is un-irrigated. These...

The United Nations Conference on Women was held nearly 15 years ago in Beijing, China. This was an extraordinary moment in the history of the international women’s movements as well as women workers around the world, with unprecedented mobilisation of feminist policymakers, activists and academics in the international political arena, both prior to the conference and subsequently. The two-part conference, referred to as Beijing Platform and the Call for Action,...

After strong protest from civil society organisations, the government has admitted that it is considering amending the Right to Information (RTI) Act. It has, however, assured activists that a transparent and consultative process will be adopted before any action is taken, and the amendments will not be persevered with if activist groups are able to convince the government that they are either unnecessary or counterproductive. These assurances notwithstanding, it is...

A Human Rights Watch report emphasises the need for a system of recording and investigating all maternal deaths.  THE maternal mortality ratio (MMR) is calculated by the number of maternal deaths for every 100,000 births. Consider this: In 2005, India’s MMR was 16 times that of Russia, 10 times that of China and four times higher than that in Brazil. Why should there be such high maternal mortality rates in...

IN the digital age, the implementation of the Right to Information Act, 2005, is deeply linked to the technology that will be adopted to store public documents and information in digital formats. Thus, the National Policy on Open Standards in E-Governance is critical to “ensure reliable long-term accessibility to public information”, wrote RTI activists, under the aegis of the National Campaign for People’s Rights to Information (NCPRI), in a letter...