After she failed in her grade ten examinations, Aarti Naik would've ended up being a domestic help like most of her classmates but chose to fight the situation she was in. Today she teaches schoolgirls from her neighbourhood for free lest they fail in their examinations and in life. Sometime in June 2003, when she received her State Secondary Certificate (SSC) examination mark sheet, Aarti Naik was crestfallen. She had failed...

The CBI search at V K Sibal's residence on Friday is likely to bring into the open a number of controversies that have surrounded the office of the directorate general of hydrocarbons (DGH) and the ministry of petroleum and natural gas in the two tenures of the UPA government. The searches were a tipping point in allegations against Sibal, a former director general of hydrocarbons whose tenure started in 2004 under...

-The Times of India   The government is set to accept the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council's recommendation to cover 75% rural and 50% urban population under a food security law, but wants to keep the percentages outside the language of the Act itself. UPA-2 is inclined to set the percentage of population covered in a notification or schedule accompanying the Act so that it can be revised by executive order...

Those of us interested in gender equality tend to be obsessed with the politically and economically important areas in which we need this equality — education, employment, health, political representation. But equality in these important but grim attributes leaves out many things that actually make life more enjoyable and thus more worth living. Women deserve more from gender equality than better housekeeping and management skills. In most societies, men are much...

As bank gears up for competition, it may further dilute environmental safeguard policies WITH financial institutions of emerging economies like India and China getting big time into development lending, the World Bank plans reforms to attract its borrowing countries. Some of the important plans are to disburse loans faster and on flexible terms. Bank watchers and civil society groups say the reforms, expected to be in force by the year-end, would...