-The Hindustan Times   The World Bank and International Monetary Fund just concluded their annual meetings in Washington. At an event on nutrition in South Asia, the evidence presented was clear and astonishing. On the one hand, South Asia has experienced robust economic growth averaging 6% a year over the past 20 years. On the other hand, the region continues to have unacceptably high rates of malnutrition with Bangladesh and India having...

India has markedly improved the access of girls to education, besides bringing down fertility and infant mortality rates, but the World Development Report 2012 on ‘Gender and Development’ issued warnings on other fronts—women’s labour participation rates remain stagnant and domestic violence is alarmingly high. The report, launched on Thursday at the World Bank, also highlighted high rates of domestic abuse and their relationship to reproductive health apart from high maternal mortality...

Amid policy battles over food production, energy resources and economic decline, one untapped natural resource that is guaranteed to boost production on a global scale has been stubbornly overlooked – the power of women in the labour force. According to the World Bank's 2012 World Development Report (WDR) "Gender Equality and Development", ensuring equal access for women farmers would increase maize yields by 11 to 16 percent in Malawi and 17...

In the name of God, hapless girls are still being made to become devadasis which in stark terms means being raped by the priests, secretly auctioned to brothels and finally dying of AIDS. Deebashree Mohanty speaks to a few of these unfortunate women who died everyday of their life for a farce called service of the God I was nine when I got married to my village deity Yellamma. The mahajan,...

Sections within civil society have reservations about Anna Hazare’s movement but the government’s failure to tap them may have lent credence to the impression that his group was speaking up for the entire nation. Although leaders like P. Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal have argued that no single group could claim to be the sole representative of civil society, the Centre has not seriously tried to open channels of communication with other...