-India Today Taking a leap of unconventionality, a non-profit trust in collaboration with a local puja club based in north Kolkata will worship the very first transgender Durga idol on Panchami. In the 300-year-old history of Durga Puja in Bengal, this will the first time where devotees will worship a transgender Durga idol that has been fashioned after the androgynous form of Shiva and Parvati, Ardhanarishvara. Organised by the non-profit trust, Pratyay Gender...

-The Hindu The production of waste in India is growing at an exponential rate. However, the welfare and dignity of the informal workers involved in the stigmatised sector of waste management remains at the bottom of any government’s political agenda. Human society has always produced waste and always will. Waste materials — substances without value — are constantly generated in all production, all distribution and all consumption processes. The time waste spends...

-The Hindu Business Line A narrow focus on growth-led development is the cause of the world’s sustainability crisis, not its solution The world’s political leaders meet in New York today to adopt a ‘sustainable development’ agenda. On the face of it, this sounds very hopeful. It signals that finally, humanity may move towards making peace with the earth, even as it erases the shame of over two billion people still living in...

-The Times of India RAIPUR: Amid a union minister recently stoking a row saying that girls wanting a night out is not acceptable in India, BJP ruled Chhattisgarh has went a step further with its class X social science textbook quoting that "working women are one of the causes of unemployment" in the country". A young teacher in tribal Jashpur district in Chhattisgarh has confronted government, questioning the content being served to...

-Business World In the run up to Independence Day, Professor Ashok Gulati wrote a scathing critique of what he has described as “elitist biases in public policy”, that ignore the reality of the masses in rural areas. The reality he describes is that of low rates of growth in agriculture; a sector that majority of Indians still depend on.  He lamented the excessive preponderance of economic policy discourse in the country...