The head of the United Nations population fund today urged Member States and development partners to take quick action to facilitate universal access to reproductive health, the empowerment of women and poverty alleviation. “We need to keep pushing to make universal access to reproductive health a reality,” said Babatunde Osotimehin, the Executive Director of UN Population Fund (UNFPA). “Investing in the health and rights of women and young people is not an...

Reconsidering its earlier decision, the United Progressive Alliance government is now contemplating not to give direct inclusion to all members of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities in the proposed BPL list if one goes by the modalities being laid out for conducting the census. Their inclusion will now be based on their ranking obtained from the number of deprivation indicators they satisfy. Similarly, minorities too don't get the same...

India needs sustainable political and governance reform, not 'Mr India'-type prime-time populism Anna Hazare got his timing right, as Kumar Ketkar, a distinguished journalist from Mumbai, put it. Considering this was obviously planned as a television-based mobilisation of middle-class India, pitching it between the cricket World Cup and the Indian Premier League series was perfect timing. Even as Mr Hazare fasted, a large number of his supporters joined him between meals,...

The Lok Pal (anti-corruption body) Bill has generated widespread interest in the past few days. The Bill is an attempt by the government, under massive pressure due to corruption charges, to gain some of its lost ground. However, civil rights activists, including Anna Hazare, Swami Agnivesh, Kiran Bedi and Arvind Kejriwal, have termed the draft legislation as weak and demanded that fifty per cent of the members in the committee drafting...

U.S. support for Muhammad Yunus is so strong that Dhaka may find a negotiated settlement to protect the Nobel Laureate's image and the independence of the Grameen Bank. Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus's three-decades-long journey with microfinance was laborious. But he most certainly did not encounter a crisis like the one he is facing now. It was only in December 2010 that the Bangladeshi — who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with...