-The Hindu Launched in 2006 by the JD(U)-BJP government at the time, the scheme provided money to all girls who enrolled in Class IX through their schools to buy themselves a cycle. The first independent, scientific evaluation of the impact of Bihar's cycles-for-girls programme has shown that the scheme significantly improved female school enrolment and substantially reduced the gender gap in secondary school enrolment. The study, by Karthik Muralidharan, an economist at...

-The Hindu Equating juveniles with adult criminals is neither scientifically correct nor normatively defensible The August 31 verdict of the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) in the Delhi gang rape case, handing down a bare three-year custodial sentence to the juvenile member, has generated a fresh round of debate on the legality and desirability of juvenile justice itself: why should juveniles above 16 indulging in violent crimes not be treated as adult criminals?...

Bihar Government's programme of distributing bicycles to school girls may be a modest intervention but is leading to big changes. A new research-based paper, brought out in August 2013, corroborates the success of the programme and testifies that it is leading to improved school enrollment of girls and arresting their dropout rates (See links below to read full paper and earlier studies on the subject).   Based on econometric and statistical models,...

-Kafila.org This fact-finding exercise was coordinated by the CENTRE FOR POLICY ANALYSIS. Team members were the human rights activist and former civil servant Harsh Mander; former Director-General of the Border Security Force, E N Rammohan; Professor Kamal Mitra Chenoy of Jawaharlal Nehru University; National Integration Council member John Dayal; senior journalist Sukumar Muralidharan and CPA Director and senior editor Seema Mustafa. Introduction and Overview The first impression of the Muzaffarnagar countryside, now green...

-The Hindu Nearly one out of four men in a United Nations study of 10,000 men in Asia admitted to having committed a rape, a report released on Tuesday shows. Marital rape was by far the most common type of rape, followed by the rape of an intimate partner. Sexual entitlement - the "belief that men were entitled to sex regardless of consent" - was the top reason men gave for committing...