-IPS News BETUL, India- Mamta Bai, 36, distinctly remembers the first time the police came to her village: it was December 2014 and her neighbour, Purva Bai, had just been beaten unconscious by her alcoholic husband, prompting Mamta to make a distress call to the nearest station. Once in the neighborhood, policemen pulled the abusive husband out of his home and asked the village women if they wanted him to be arrested. “Yes,”...
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Records may not show, but women farmers dying too -Priyanka Kakodkar
-The Times of India AKOLA: For the last 23 years, Rukhmabai Rathod had run her 6-acre farm virtually single-handedly. After her husband's death in 1992, the uneducated but determined woman took charge. She decided what to sow, how much to spend and stood her ground with banks and creditors. "She was anguthachaap but she understood everything," says her brother-in-law Babulal Rathod from the Kazadeshwar village in Vidarbha's Akola district. "I didn't think...
More »Debt, despair and death as farm crisis deepens -Sarbjit Dhaliwal
-The Tribune Grains Of Discontent: The damage to wheat crop due to untimely rain and hailstorm, followed by delayed payments, this rabi season has further stressed Punjab’s farmers. While the cost of farm inputs has risen manifold over the past few years, the profit margin is on a constant decline, thus making farming unviable. Unable to bear losses, several farmers have committed suicide in recent past As the day breaks, he enters...
More »More girls being born, but fewer surviving -Subodh Varma
-The Times of India There is good news and bad news on one of the key problems that haunts India - survival of the girl child. Sex ratio at birth, that is, the number of girls born for every 1000 boys born, has inched up from 906 to 909 between 2007 and 2013. This suggests that female feticide, the monstrous practice of killing off the girl baby in the mothers' womb...
More »Debating the ‘right to die’ -Faizan Mustafa
-The Hindu Attempt to commit suicide should stay on the statute book because suicide comes in conflict with the monopolistic power of the state to take away life You choose your country, you choose your spouse, you choose your profession, you choose your political masters, and you choose where you want to live and how. Die you must. But how to die and when: should that be a matter of choice as...
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