-TheWire.in Veerpal Kaur, who lost her father and then husband to the growing spate of farmer suicides in Punjab, says neither the SAD-BJP alliance nor the Congress is addressing the issue. Dharamvir Singh was being considered, one thing played in their favour – both the bride and groom had lost their fathers, both farmers, to suicide. Kaur’s father drank poison in 1995 and Singh’s hanged himself in 1990. “That was what clinched it....

-TheWire.in Children born to adolescent mothers score poorly on height and weight for their age. New Delhi: Data from the fourth National Family and Health Survey (NFHS-4) surveyed 60,096 women to find what age they were at the time of their first pregnancy. It was found that 25% of these women were in the age group of 10-19 years (adolescence). Children born to adolescent mothers score poorly on height and weight for their...

-The Hindu ‘It’s not just trolling, it’s an abuse of human rights’ New Delhi: Launching a crowd-sourced study on the abuse that Indian women politicians face on Twitter, Amnesty India says online trolling aimed at THReatening and silencing them must be considered a human rights violation. “It’s so easy for men to dismiss it as just ‘trolling’, but we are talking about rape THReats, death THReats, stalking…words which can lead to deep physical...

-The Indian Express To fulfil the constitutional requirement, reservation must be based on a rigorous identification of economic backwardness. The introduction of the 124th constitutional amendment that provides the possibility of quotas for the “economically weaker sections” (EWS) has rekindled the debate on reservations. These quotas diverge from reservation policies for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other socially and educationally backward classes, by jettisoning caste or community identity as the...

-The Hindu Business Line Climate change and other agrarian distress are forcing the farming community to scrounge for a living outside its comfort zone The work I do — editing the work of journalists reporting on water issues in the Himalayan region — gives me a close-up of how climate change is disrupting agriculture. Almost 80 per cent of water usage in India, and most of its neighbouring countries, is for agriculture....