A study questions the efficacy of conditional cash transfer schemes in promoting the girl child. IN an attempt to address some of the serious imbalances in society, specifically the gender imbalance, the Central and State governments have embarked on several short-term conditional cash transfer (CCT) schemes in the past decade and a half. While the Central government is convinced about the efficacy of the schemes aimed at arresting the distorted sex...

Despite 60 years of Constitutional guarantees and two decades after the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, India's children still continue to face grave violation of their basic rights, an independent social audit has revealed. “We do not have a National Policy for Children defining the ‘child'. In fact, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has time and again recommended that a...

Are smaller states easier to govern and hence better for the people? The most recent reorganization took place in November 2000 when three mega states - Uttar Pradesh,Bihar and Madhya Pradesh - were sliced up to give birth to Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, respectively. It is more than a decade since then. The new states are now well-established. But, how are they faring compared to the 'mother' states? Has the...

Mirchpur Dalit naib tehsildar can't be prosecuted due to his caste Drawing upon a couple of instances in the Mirchpur caste violence trial in which the Judge was constrained by two sub-sections of the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, to sentence three convicted Jat men to life imprisonment offering no judicial discretion for a lighter sentence, and the neglect of duties by a Dalit naib tehsildar of Mirchpur...

-The Economist   The world’s population will reach 7 billion at the end of October. Don’t panic IN 1950 the whole population of the earth—2.5 billion—could have squeezed, shoulder to shoulder, onto the Isle of Wight, a 381-square-kilometre rock off southern England. By 1968 John Brunner, a British novelist, observed that the earth’s people—by then 3.5 billion—would have required the Isle of Man, 572 square kilometres in the Irish Sea, for its standing...