-Down to Earth The focus must be on safeguarding women and girls’ reproductive health. Smaller families can be achieved by ensuring gender equality, empowering women The law proposed by the Uttar Pradesh Law Commission on July 7, 2021 on two-child policy compels couples to limit their families through a series of incentives and disincentives. There is no evidence, however, that coercive policies can truly reduce fertility. Two-child policies are known to disproportionately impact...

-The Hindu There has been sharp rise in the NPAs amid COVID-19 pandemic With unemployment rising, the ability of those who have taken education loans to pay back has come down sharply. As a result, the non-performing assets (NPAs) have increased in the last one-and-a-half years. R. Nagarajan had taken a loan for his engineering course and started repaying it when he got a job at a start-up in the second half of...

-The Hindu The Uttar Pradesh government should understand that evidence backs the principle of informed free choice Many of us working in the field of public health and social development have been taken aback, if not downright shocked, by the recently announced draft Uttar Pradesh Population (Control, Stabilization and Welfare) Bill, 2021 that focuses exclusively on making a two-child norm a law, specifying various incentives and penalties for contravention. The burgeoning negative...

-Hindustan Times The cases of Zika virus were reported three days ago and has now climbed to 15 in Kerala. The state government has formulated as action plan to check the spread of zika virus disease. The Centre too has rushed a team of experts to the southern state. Tamil Nadu has intensified checking at its border with Kerala after cases of Zika virus emerged in the southern state. Tight vigil is...

-The Hindu Blaming ‘the system’ alone for Father Stan Swamy’s death obscures how India’s political economy is linked to deprival When an officer from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) came to interrogate Father Stan Swamy last monsoon, the Jesuit sociologist, then 83, in turn asked him about police integrity, and why a father-son duo (P. Jayaraj and Bennicks) should die of custodial torture in a Tamil Nadu police lock-up. It was quintessential...