-Livemint.com With shrinking farm sizes and lack of accurate land records, farmers find it difficult to generate enough income to provide for their households From farm subsidies to farm loan waivers, the Indian government spends crores on farmer welfare, but these efforts will be inadequate unless they can tackle an increasingly daunting barrier: lack of land. The provisional figures from the latest agriculture census reveals how land—the most critical input for agriculture—is...

  Released in May this year, a study by Save the Children has found that if you are an adolescent girl living in the country, then you are most likely to be afraid about being harassed outside your homes viz. in public places. Entitled WINGS 2018 - World of India's Girls: A study on the perception of girls’ safety in public spaces, the study shows that nearly one-third of teenage girls surveyed...

-Livemint.com Odisha is a front-runner in women’s land ownership, much of it owing to government policies from the 1980s. But has ownership led to empowerment? Surrounded by sun-drenched paddy fields interspersed with jackfruit and banana trees, Sanakusupadu is a hamlet in Odisha’s tribal-dominated district of Rayagada. Here, almost every married woman owns land. No matter how small the holding, land documents of the 62 households in this village bear the names of the...

-The Hindu Right to dignity includes right to refuse treatment and die with dignity. In a historic decision, the Supreme Court on Friday declared passive euthanasia and the right of persons, including the terminally ill, to give advance directives to refuse medical treatment permissible. A Constitution Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, in three concurring opinions, upheld that the fundamental right to life and dignity includes right to refuse treatment...

-The Times of India Laduben, 70, of Kuda village in Gujarat's Bhavnagar has waited for more than 20 years to be recognised as a 'farmer' in government records and become the rightful owner of the land she cultivated for years. Laduben's husband passed away when her three daughters were little and she was carrying her fourth child. Her in-laws got her name removed from the family varsai (Inheritance document). Her brother-in-law insisted...