-Scroll.in The model of conditional cash incentives for protecting the girl child has not fared very well in India. Over the years, there have been many initiatives across India to promote the girl child and improve its poor child sex ratio. The schemes have differed in name, but converged in their general inefficiency. Now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched another such scheme, grandly calLED the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao Yojana, in...

-The Hindu Although urban Indians are slowly showing more openness in their attitudes towards women's attire, this is not the case when it comes to the issue of son preference As one of the world's most socially heterogeneous societies, building solidarity across social groups has been a singular challenge in India. Social bias in India is pervasive across a range of key cleavages - whether caste or class, region or religion. In this...

-The New Indian Express At a time when millions of people are being pushed into poverty by health care costs, there is good news from Karnataka. The state, a pioneer in government-LED health assurance, launched another innovative programme on Tuesday. The Rajiv Arogya Bhagya scheme for uninsured people above the poverty line covers tertiary treatment, including 449 surgical procedures, in seven specialties: cardiology, neurology, urology, oncology, burns, polytrauma and paediatrics. Each...

-Economic and Political Weekly This paper, based on an empirical study in Chhattisgarh and Gujarat, attempts to examine the land and livelihood facets of forest dependent people following the claims made by them under the Forest Rights Act. It also touches upon factors influencing livelihoods such as source of irrigation, crop yield, forest produce collection, and livestock holdings to examine the respondents' socio-economic conditions. The findings reveaLED that the land received...

-The Hindu Kolkata: At a time when the Trinamool Congress-LED West Bengal government has a strained relationship with the Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre, a report by the Labour Bureau of India suggested that Bengal's employment rate was on the rise. According to the TMC's official website, the fourth Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey Report reveaLED that the unemployment rate in 2014 fell to 52 from 74 in 2012-13, the lowest since the...