-The Hindu Existing laws on juvenile justice, bonded labour and POCSO sufficient, say experts. The emphasis on criminalisation and policing instead of welfare measures in the new proposed anti-trafficking Bill makes it anti-migrants and anti-sex workers, warn experts. The Ministry of Women and Child Development recently placed the Trafficking in Persons (Prevention, Care and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2021, in the public domain and sought stakeholders' comments till July 14. The Bill is also scheduled...

-The Hindu Lower stunting among children with mothers who had access to free school lunches, shows data from 1993-2016. Girls who had access to the free lunches provided at government schools, had children with a higher height-to-age ratio than those who did not, says a new study on the inter-generational benefits of India’s midday meal scheme published in Nature Communications this week. Using nationally representative data on cohorts of mothers and their children...

-TheWire.in 'When I made this house myself brick by brick, where were they then?' New Delhi: A few weeks after the Supreme Court ordered the demolition of the residential properties in Khori Gaon, bulldozers began to destroy the settlement under police and Army presence.  Referred to by the Court as an encroachment, the settlement contains over 10,000 homes, with over 1 lakh residents (for scale, this is little under the population of the...

-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...

-IndiaTogether.org A survey of nearly 15,000 women in the aftermath of the pandemic-induced lockdown last year reveals specific ways in which women are particularly vulnerable to risks. This could provide valuable input for new interventions, writes Gaurav Gupta. After India's first nationwide lockdown was announced on March 24, 2020 a flurry of important, rapid research was conducted by multiple private, public, and social sector organisations to understand the effects of the pandemic....