-The Hindu One must agree with certain aspects of Prof. Krishna Kumar’s centrepiece in The Hindu on June 30, 2012 (“A messy corner of India’s modernity”), on the dilemma of the schoolteacher in denying admission to child brides but at the same time examine some of his propositions from the perspective of girls who are exercising agency to continue in the education system. As he has stated, schools are not to be...

-Deccan Chronicle For love, they had to give up their lands. Nine years ago, two dalit brothers – Sakthivel and Andvan from Erode, had fallen in love with caste Hindu girls and eloped with them. The two couples are now happily married, but they had to ‘sacrifice’ their 12-acre land in their native village Ottanchathiram, that has been usurped by the caste Hindus. And since they value their lives more than their land,...

-The Hindu Magsaysay award winner and the chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), Dr. Shantha Sinha, on Saturday called for conducting more studies and research towards evolving strong policies to protect the rights of children between 14 and 18 years old. Dr. Sinha said that children in that age group are very vulnerable, with many of them getting married and having at least two to three...

-The Guardian 'Pathway for a sustainable future' declared, but Greenpeace says summit was failure of epic proportions Amid doubt, disappointment and division, the world's governments came together in Rio on Friday to declare "a pathway for a sustainable century". At the close of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, heads of state and ministers from more than 190 nations signed off on a plan to set global sustainable development goals and other measures to...

-The Hindustan Times Culture and tradition have always been cited as the bedrocks on which our superior family values are founded. But like so many elevating qualities that we feel we are endowed with, this too is largely a myth. A recent survey by Child Rights and You found that one-third of Delhi feels that children should work as hard as adults and that they should be paid less. The invisibility...