-The Hindustan Times   On the night of February 5, a woman, on her way back from visiting a nightclub in Kolkata’s Park Street area, was raped inside the vehicle in which she had been offered a lift. Horrifying as it is, the violence perpetrated was not unique in the annals of urban crime. A mother of two, the 37-year-old was alone, her companions having already left. She had been drinking for a...

-Live Mint   Never in the history of India has a welfare programme of such scale been launched before. As the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) enters its seventh year, its statistics are staggering. In 2011-12, 37.8 million households were provided employment and 1,208 million persondays of work were generated. In its scale and ambition, the programme is pharaonic. If the programme succeeds in its mission—and that is still a...

More than 80 per cent complaints filed under the seven-year-old domestic violence act have been declared too trivial for such a law to address, raising fears that it is being used to settle scores while graver atrocities go unreported. However, the nature of many complaints also suggests that women are no longer willing to play a subservient role in marital life. The highest number of complaints related to charges that the husband...

—PTI A woman cannot be denied her right to residence in the house of her in-laws or husband under the law against domestic violence on mere allegation that she is having an extra-marital affair, a Delhi court has observed. “Simply because the petition for divorce is filed against the spouse and the husband alleges that his wife has relations with another person, the wife does not become disentitled to right of residence,...

-The Times of India   Maharashtra reported the highest number of domestic violence cases in 2010-11 of which economic abuse was the most rampant, followed by the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, a study has found. While Andhra reported higher number of physical abuse cases, Karnataka was evenly placed in cases of economic and physical abuse.  Maharashtra reported 2,433 cases followed by Andhra with 1,174 cases and Karnataka with 1,013 cases....