KEY TRENDS   • Maternal Mortality Ratio for India was 370 in 2000, 286 in 2005, 210 in 2010, 158 in 2015 and 145 in 2017. Therefore, the MMRatio for the country decreased by almost 61 percent between 2000 and 2017 *14    • As per the NSS 71st round, among rural females aged 5-29 years, the main reasons for dropping out/ discontinuance were: engagement in domestic activities, not interested in education, financial constraints and marriage. Among rural males aged...

India's first caste-based census since 1931 will take place next year, the cabinet has announced. It said the controversial count would last from June-September 2011, after a full census had been held. Answering questions on caste will be optional. The move is intended to help target affirmative action benefits. Discrimination relating to caste in Hinduism - the complex social hierarchy based on people's occupations - is banned in India but still goes on. Critics...

Investing first in the world’s most disadvantaged children and communities can save millions of lives and help spur progress towards achieving internationally agreed development targets, according to a new study by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The agency found that an equity-based approach, focusing on the needs of the most disadvantaged children, can be a cost-effective strategy to reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – eight targets that include slashing...

While the landmark Right to Education Act takes the promise of primary education to more than eight million children, there are still many lacunae on the ground. But, as the Shiksha Adhikar Yatra, conducted by Dalit organisations in UP and Rajasthan showed, citizens now have the tools to demand and receive effective governance.  The landmark right to information act has made a huge impact at the local level on the...

Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing? I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification...