Diluting women's share in marital property in the event of divorce, the government has sought to restrict the provision for `immoveable property' to residential assets, a move opposed by women's rights activists. The marriage amendment bill seeks to amend the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and the Special Marriage Act, 1954, legislating a women's right to marital property acquired during the subsistence of marriage. The amendment cleared by the Union Cabinet recently...

It is mostly caused by deliberate neglect and designed failure of the way we manage water and land It’s drought time again. Nothing new in this announcement. Each year, first we have crippling droughts between December and June, and then devastating floods in the next few months. It’s a cycle of despair, which is more or less predictable. But this is not an inevitable cycle of nature we must live...

With an eye to mainstreaming sustainability, rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has reached out to the United Nations Development Programme to suggest ways for 'greening' rural development schemes and programmes. "We are spending Rs 99,000 crore this year on rural development programmes and it would be a shame if we don't mainstream green objectives in these programmes. Rural development programmes offer a huge opportunity to deal with green concerns and challenges...

-The Financial Express Lots of work ahead to make RTE work The reasons behind the poor performance of schools students in India are slowly being whittled down from a whole range of reasons (low attendance, high drop-out rate, lack of teachers, lack of adequate number of schools, etc) to just a few key areas that need a lot of work. The most pressing need seems to be the paucity of trained and...

There is a complicated relationship between abortion as such and the selective abortion of female foetuses. This dilemma is one with which the women’s movement in India has been grappling since the late 1980s. In my discussion of this dilemma, I would like to move away completely from Satyamev Jayate, the television programme, (on which a discussion has been initiated by Shohini Ghosh on kafila.org). In any case, there the...