-Livemint.com Investments via gender lens increase access to capital for women and girls, improve gender Equality, say experts Less than 7% of all philanthropic dollars find their way to programmes designed specifically for girls and women—not a promising figure if gender Equality in the world is the ultimate goal. This was the startling finding of a 2014 study by Women Moving Millions, an international not-for-profit agency. To improve gender Equality, experts suggest...

-The Times of India Mumbai: The 16th Lok Sabha may have the highest number of women that the Lower House has ever had, but India has slipped from a rank of 117 among 188 countries in 2014 to 144 among 191 countries as on February 1, 2016, in terms of the proportion of women in Parliament. Barely 12% of MPs in the Lok Sabha are women and the figure stands at 12.8%...

-The Hindu We cannot permit gross inEquality-linked deprivation to leave its malign signature on the lives of those who are yet to come. As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of the markets and financial speculation, and by attacking the structural causes of inEquality, no solution can be found for the world’s problems. InEquality is the root of social ills. —...

-The Hindu The ruling party is doing its best to establish that being critical of its government is tantamount to being anti-national. It is not just the inconvenient person or collective being intimidated; the Constitution is under attack. “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” — George Orwell The controlled voice of Ravish Kumar on a blackened screen and his stark report on NDTV India on February 19...

Although there is sufficient data and evidence available in the public domain to argue whether there has been halving of poverty between 1990 and 2015, the same cannot be said with conviction about the halving of hunger—one of the targets set under the erstwhile Millennium Development Goals framework (replaced recently by SDGs). This is because the recently released data by the National Family Health Survey-4 (conducted in 2015-16) and the...