-The Hindu Consent does not matter, says study A majority of parents who get their children married before the legal age do not even seek their consent, and among those who do, the child not consenting does not stop the marriage, new data has shown. In 2011, the Planning Commission selected the G.B. Pant Institute of Studies in Rural Development, Lucknow, for a study on child marriage in India. The 2005-06 National Family...

-The Hindu Dharmapuri (Tamil Nadu): An emaciated Kumudha looks the very symbol of women who have no reproductive agency or bodily rights, one of the many reasons for the neonatal deaths that occurred at the government hospital here last weekend. A week after losing her two-day-old son to preterm-low birth weight complications, Kumudha just returned home after administration of intravenous fluids at the primary health centre at Palayamapudur, some six km from...

-The Hindu "Antenatal care is very important for health workers to detect mothers with obesity or diabetes... both specific risks during pregnancy," says Dr. Flavia Bustreo, Assistant Director General at WHO. In 2013, globally, preterm birth complications were responsible for 15 per cent (0.96 million) of deaths in children under five years of age. It is a leading cause of death in neonates (0-27 days after birth). According to WHO, about 15...

-The Indian Express Exposure to television and digital media grew by leaps and bounds between 2005 and 2012. From Naxalbari to the Arab Spring, our popular imagination has seen the youth as the harbinger of revolution that breaks down the bastions of privilege. How do we reconcile this with the decisive victory that modern Indian youth have handed to the BJP, whose manifesto focused on entrepreneurship rather than redistribution? I would like...

-IPS News MALKANGIRI (Odisha)- Scattered across 31 remote hilltop villages on a mountain range that towers 1,500 to 4,000 feet above sea level, in the Malkangiri district of India's eastern Odisha state, the Upper Bonda people are considered one of this country's most ancient tribes, having barely altered their lifestyle in over a thousand years. Resistant to contact with the outside world and fiercely skeptical of modern development, this community of under...