Children are now much higher on the global AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) agenda and there is a major shift in commitment, including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria’s Board, to increase support for Preventing Mother-To-Child Transmission (PMTCT). India has received extended support from the Global Fund for Preventing Parent-To-Child Transmission (PPTCT), according to the Fourth Stocktaking Report, produced by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund,...

HAS GREEN REVOLUTION FAILED INDIA'S POOR? Green Revolution Vs Rain-fed Farming OVERVIEW: Of late India’s fabled Green Revolution has come under severe attack. Many development thinkers believe that it has unfairly skewed India’s agriculture policy in favour of the farmers whose land is already or potentially covered under irrigation. The basic criticism is that the Green Revolution has been largely irrelevant for India’s 60 per cent cultivable land which is un-irrigated. These...

The rural population is at present estimated at 85 crores. Ten per cent of the households are completely landless. Another 52 per cent have holdings of less than 0.2 hectare. The per capita agricultural land in the rural areas has come down to 0.12 hectare. According to the National Sample Survey, the annual income of an agricultural household from farming is less than Rs 12,000 and from all sources it...

The United Nations Conference on Women was held nearly 15 years ago in Beijing, China. This was an extraordinary moment in the history of the international women’s movements as well as women workers around the world, with unprecedented mobilisation of feminist policymakers, activists and academics in the international political arena, both prior to the conference and subsequently. The two-part conference, referred to as Beijing Platform and the Call for Action,...

Whenever I went missing as a child, my mother would come looking for me in the pata, Lalitabai Meshram said, laughing out loud. “My friends and I would play in the tangled vines for hours, making dolls of corn husk and hair, eating groundnuts, beans and waluk melon. Sometimes I would fall asleep there,” recalled Meshram, now 50-plus. Last year, after about four decades, she carved out a pata from...