-The Indian Express The research shows that India’s mobile phone gender gap - 33 per cent - is among the highest in the world, surpassing several countries with comparable incomes, development levels, and mobile phone costs. New Delhi:  Apart from economic constraints, social barriers like the level of education, marital status and the lack of empowerment prevent women’s access to mobile technology in India, suggests a study by the Harvard Kennedy School. The...

-The Indian Express The data in India is flawed, marked by both under- and over-reporting. The question is not whether India’s women are safe, but whether they are free Very rarely does data become a political hot-button issue in India, dominating the shouty nightly news debates and the daily Twitter sniping. Earlier this month, it was about data on the status of women, following an international survey that found India to be...

-The Hindu Business Line Informal networks play a key role in building a trust mechanism that dispels the fear in rebels to quit insurgency groups How do rebels quit armed groups and return to the same political processes they had once sought to overthrow? A lot has been written on why men and women rebel. But we know very little about why and how rebels quit. This is, however, a predominant concern...

  Budgetary allocation to a particular sector indicates how much priority the government assigns to that sector as compared to the rest. A preliminary analysis by the Inclusive Media for Change team indicates that the actual expenditure (net of receipts and recoveries) by two of the country’s most important ministries, namely the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (MoAFW) and the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) was less than 1 percent...

-Frontline.in The Assembly elections have put under intense scrutiny Narendra Modi’s Gujarat model of development which is touted as worthy of replication throughout the country. Audit reports of the CAG provide ample evidence of it being inefficient, corrupt and not beneficial to the common people. THE standard indicators of development, as is understood in theory and practice, comprise a range of indices, and not necessarily the level of private investment in...