Bardani Logun sits on a plastic chair in the communal room of a hostel in Rohini, north Delhi, where she lives with her toddler, and speaks candidly about being beaten, abused and starved. She is one of countless young women from the tribal belt of India who have migrated to Delhi to find work as live-in maids, hoping to send their earnings back home to support impoverished families in Jharkhand, Orissa,...

Indian physicist and environmentalist Vandana Shiva has won the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize for her efforts towards women empowerment in developing nations and her scientific contribution to climate conservation. The 57-year-old activist has been recognised for her work on the empowerment of women in developing countries, her advocacy of the human rights of small farming communities, and her scientific analysis of environmental sustainability. Shiva will give the City of Sydney Peace Prize...

When a problem is big and tends to profit a powerful group, there’s a time-honoured temptation to sweep it under the rug by assuming it’s natural and inevitable. This was true of slavery until the abolitionist movement of the 19th century, and of colonialism until the contagion of independence movements in the 20th century. Now these same forces are at work in attitudes toward the global and national realities of...

The number of sex workers in the country may touch a whopping five million in just a few years, if the world's oldest profession is legalized as suggested by the Supreme Court, warn activists. Hearing a PIL by NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan about large scale child trafficking, the apex court had last week said that if the trade can't be curbed through punitive measures, legalizing it would be a better...

  KEY TRENDS   • The report entitled Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana: An Assessment from the Centre for Science and Environment (released on 21 July, 2017) finds that PMBY is not beneficial for farmers in vulnerable regions. For farmers in vulnerable regions such as Bundelkhand and Marathwada, factors like low indemnity levels, low threshold yields, low sum insured and default on loans make PMFBY a poor scheme to safeguard against extreme weather events. CSE's...