Government science institutions across India may be able to earn labels that certify them as gender-friendly places under new proposals from a national task force on women in science. The 14-member government task force has also called for an end to some unwritten rules widely practised during recruitment to scientific institutions, including one that denies a spouse appointment in the same institution. The recommendations from the task force, which was...

Interview with Joan Mencher, an anthropologist who has worked in India for long on issues such as agriculture, ecology and caste.   JOAN P. MENCHER is a Professor emerita of Anthropology from the City University of New York’s Graduate Centre and Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is the chair of an embryonic not-for-profit organisation, The Second Chance Foundation, which works to support rural grass-roots organisations...

I first met Paul Samuelson in 1962, as a student at MIT. A decade later, I had the pleasure of co-authoring with him a paper on the Theory of Index Numbers (American Economic Review, 1974) and another in the Royal Economic Society’s Economic Journal (1984). I last met him a couple of years back, on a sidewalk in Belmont, Massachussets. He was driving down the street and stopped upon seeing...

Paul A. Samuelson (May 15, 1915 — December 13, 2009) has often been described as the foremost academic economist of the 20th century. Randall E. Parker, the economic historian, has called him the “Father of Modern Economics”. All this may be hotly disputed in Chicago, but in any case, Samuelson was the first American to receive the Nobel prize in economic sciences. The Swedish Royal Academy’s citation stated that he...

Introduction The phenomenon of disability is one of the pressing problems in the world. According to the projections of international agencies, about 10 per cent of the population are affected with physical, mental, sensory and other forms of impairments and around 75 per cent of the disabled population are concentrated in the rural and inaccessible areas of the developing societies. This data is based on recent studies carried out in various...