-TheNewsMinute.com Set up in 2017, Kisan Mitra provides Counselling to distressed farmers and acts as a bridge between them and the government. “It was during the 2018 floods that we got a call from a farmer in Adilabad. The caller didn’t need any help for himself but said that his neighbour has been sitting in a corner of his field since morning with a bottle of pesticide in his hand. The...

-The Hindu New Delhi: Anganwadi services have a poor reach among key beneficiaries – the poorest of the poor and uneducated mothers – according to a paper published in a WHO bulletin recently. The government’s Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) provides a package of six services at anganwadi or child-care centres to young children and pregnant women and lactating mothers. These services include supplementary nutrition, referral services, immunisation, health check-up, pre-school non-formal...

-The Indian Express New India cannot view empowerment of women merely as economic resource. Last month, Niti Aayog released a report on state-level progress across various indicators under the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The comprehensive index score on gender equality (Goal 5) revealed that all Indian states, except Kerala and Sikkim, fall in the red zone, signifying low performance. Despite such worrisome findings in its own report, Niti Aayog’s almost simultaneously...

-The Indian Express Anganwadi workers, teachers, nurses are paid low salaries, their work devalued Frontline workers providing basic services through various government programmes form the backbone of the country’s social welfare system. India’s ability to achieve its SDGs or to have a healthy skilled workforce that contributes towards economic progress or social and human development depends to a large extent on the performance of teachers, nurses, anganwadi workers, panchayat secretaries and...

-The Hindu It is time to make victim impact statements mandatory In Mallikarjun Kodagil (Dead) v. State of Karnataka (2018), the Supreme Court stressed the need to have a victim impact statement “so that an appropriate punishment is awarded to the convict”. This throws up many issues that are of interest to the victims of crimes. The term victim came to be defined in criminal law only in 2009 in India. The victim...