-The Hindu Pune: In 2000, he led a campaign demanding entry for women into the Shani Shingnapur temple. The trail-blazing activism by rationalist firebrand Narendra Dabholkar, who was killed by right-wing elements, and his Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti (MANS) to combat the ban on women entering temples was a vital phase in the organisation’s untiring efforts to strive for gender equality in Maharashtra. While the struggle commenced with the usual raucous noises...

-The Times of India There has been a steady decline in India's overall sex ratio (SR) over the 20th century. The 1975 Report of the Committee of the Status of Women drew attention to the fact that while the 1901 census showed 972 females per thousand males, this had declined steadily to 946 in 1951, 941 in 1961, and 930 in 1971. The 1981 census, however, threw up a happy figure of...

-Business World In the run up to Independence Day, Professor Ashok Gulati wrote a scathing critique of what he has described as “elitist biases in public policy”, that ignore the reality of the masses in rural areas. The reality he describes is that of low rates of growth in agriculture; a sector that majority of Indians still depend on.  He lamented the excessive preponderance of economic policy discourse in the country...

-The Hindu A young girl in Jharkhand committed suicide because her father refused to build a toilet for her. When will the Indian male’s insensitivity to women’s basic needs change? Indian men urgently need basic ethical education. Since the 19th century, women’s education has been a progressive obsession with enlightened Indian social reformers. Although much remains to be done to get anywhere close to equal access to education for the genders, there...

-The Times of India In all the buzz about Narendra Modi's promotion of #selfiewithdaughter, what seems to have been overlooked is one bar baric form of discrimination that millions of daughters continue to suffer in this day and age. It's child marriage, which affects the upbringing of daughters and pushes them into situations long before they are physically and mentally capable of handling them. The country has displayed few signs of...