Panel meets Mamata, seeks an action taken report within three months The National Commission for Women (NCW) has expressed deep concern over the reported case of sexual assault on a physically challenged minor girl allegedly by a medical professional at the Bankura Medical Hospital in West Bengal. “The case is extremely distressing considering that the victim is a person of special needs and she was under the care of a doctor, who...

Rudyard Kipling opens his superb novel with the street urchin Kim teasing the son of a wealthy man. Kim kicks Chota Lal, whose father, Lala Dinanath, is worth half-a-million sterling, off the trunnion of the mighty cannon Zam-Zammah. Kipling loved India and wrote that it was the only democratic place in the world. It warms us to read this, but of course this was quite untrue in Kipling’s time and...

BIJLIPUR (PUNJAB): For some time now, the village of Bijlipur has been attracting a slew of local news TV crews and even reporters from Canadian radio stations. The village has something that most of Punjab can't boast of: a sex ratio in favour of women. The state of Punjab along with Haryana is among the country's worst performers when it comes to sex ratio. The census 2011 figures record 893 females...

Overlooked and ignored, the problem of untouchability continues to be practised and perpetrated in the country. It is a lifetime of misery and humiliation, unimaginable for the relatively privileged but a daily reality for over one-fifth of the country’s 120 crore-plus population, as revealed succinctly in 22 short and easy to view videos under the Article 17 Campaign launched on April 14, 2012 by India Unheard, which claims to be...

-Economic and Political Weekly Two years after the Right to Education Act, the government needs to focus on quality. Two years is perhaps too short a period in which to assess how effective the groundbreaking Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 (RTE), which came into effect on 1 April 2010, has been in raising standards of education in a country as diverse as India. The very fact that...