-Outlook India A district collector takes it upon himself to rid the region of a degrading practice visited upon sick children—the scourge of daagna Umaria, Madhya Pradesh, goes to sleep at 7 pm. Or the roads give that impression—quiet and enchantingly deserted. The young (it was carved out of Shahdol in 1998) and small district is also home to Bandhavgarh National Park. Umaria also has a prevalent malpractice, called daagna, which has its...

-The Hindu The AAP will hope that the Assembly polls are a referendum on its government’s work Delhi, the Union Territory (UT) that hosts India’s capital city, might lag behind several States in total population and in area, but it enjoys outsize significance in terms of media and political attention. With 1.47 crore electors spread across the largely metropolitan national capital region and its pockets of rural voters in some suburbs, Delhi...

-Livemint.com Document-driven processes such as the proposed National Register of Citizens are likely to place the heaviest burden on Adivasis and Muslims Among the many conceits of the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens is this: that only “illegal immigrants" need fear not having the proper documentation. News reporting from Assam has exposed repeatedly that this is not necessarily the case, with women and the poor bearing the brunt of the National...

-The Hindu Report on congenital deformities in children born to women exposed to the 1984 gas leak is inconclusive, says committee. An expert committee explicitly barred the publication of the findings of a research study that said babies born to women — who as children were exposed to the 1984 gas leak in Bhopal — were significantly more likely to have “congenital malformations” than those born to women unexposed to the gas. The...

  A high maternal mortality ratio (MMRatio) indicates low status of women in the society apart from poor functioning of the health services delivery system. Recently released data by the Sample Registration System (SRS) bulletin indicates that for the country as a whole the MMRatio has steadily declined from 398.0 in 1997-98 to 122.0 in 2015-17, which is a fall by -69.3 percent. Table-1 shows that India's MMRatio was 398.0 in 1997-98,...