The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council will send the Working Group's Draft Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011 to the Union Home and Law Ministries within a week to solicit their comments, especially on its “legal dimensions,” NAC sources told The Hindu on Thursday. Once the Centre responds to the draft, the Working Group will revise the Bill and bring it back to the...

Correcting The Skew... Among suggestions made for checking prenatal sex determination are:     * Police presence outside suspect ultrasound clinics and hospitals     * An online complaint forum to allow people to inform on erring clinics     * Mapping of districts, identification of problem regions and analysis of data to determine causative factors     * Tracking sex ratio through data collection at birth, so that real-time data is available for corrective measures *** The news of the...

Patriarchal societies are part of the problem of altered sex ratios, female infanticide and foeticide. This needs to be acknowledged and changed. India's sex ratio, among children aged 0-6 years, is alarming. The ratio has declined from 976 females (for every 1000 males) in 1961 to 914 in 2011. Every national census has documented a decline in the ratio, signalling a ubiquitous trend. Preliminary data from the 2011 census have recorded...

A bill drafted by the National Advisory Council to check communal violence seeks to impose greater accountability on public officials in tackling violence or discrimination against vulnerable groups. The council, headed by Sonia Gandhi, today took up the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, prepared by one of its working groups. The council has decided to put the draft bill in the public domain to invite...

It was indeed an unusual ''social movement''. A group of ''activists'' who had banded together to draft one version of a bill that would establish a statutory institution to investigate corruption in the political establishment sits in protest demanding the acceptance and passage of its version of the bill. The protest has elements of a social drama inasmuch as it fronts an elderly leader, Anna Hazare, with Gandhian credentials, a...