Not a quota within quota but a commitment to social justice and a proactive offer to field women from the subaltern strata. That is the way to silence the opponents of the Bill.  Fourteen years and one small victory later, the Women's Reservation Bill has again begun to look iffy. In all this time, a lot many things could have been done independent of the fate of the Bill. Those in...

FOR THE human race to survive, Mahatma Gandhi would always insist, its women must eventually take charge of the affairs of men. In the last 150 years, incredibly courageous women’s rights movements have waged epochal battles across the world, most notably in the US, to wrest parity from generations of chauvinistic men, bringing themselves adult suffrage, working rights and numerous social, political and economic benefits. So, for India to become...

The introduction of many new social welfare schemes could be delayed because the rural development ministry and the Planning Commission have yet to agree on a suitable new way to identify the poor, the main intended beneficiaries of these schemes. One key programme that is likely to be hit is the proposed National Food Security Act, which aims to provide every Indian family that lives below the poverty line (BPL) 25kg...

The BJP has wrenched power in “yet another state”. The Congress is looking at long-term gains by refusing to back Shibu Soren. But the Jharkhand verdict has also opened the eyes of the two mainline parties to a disturbing realisation: their failure to “nurture” tribal leaders. “Both of us stand exposed as out-and-out upper caste parties who have failed to create, and worse, nurture tribal leadership. The mandate’s message is the...

The Centre is veering round to accepting the N C Saxena committee’s methodology for identifying below poverty line (BPL) families through a census but may go in for a crucial change — replace ‘‘Muslim’’ with ‘‘minority’’ for extra weightage on poverty index. The Union rural development ministry is considering minorities as a whole, in place of only Muslims, who are to be given an extra point weightage in BPL identification....