When Nirupama Pathak left this remote mining region for graduate school in New Delhi, she seemed to be leaving the old India for the new. Her parents paid her tuition and did not resist when she wanted to choose her own career. But choosing a husband was another matter. Her family was Brahmin, the highest Hindu caste, and when Ms. Pathak, 22, announced she was secretly engaged to a young man...
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Beyond prescriptive targets by AR Nanda
A sustainable population stabilisation strategy needs to be embedded in a rights-based and gender-sensitive local community needs-led approach. An authoritarian top-down target approach is not the answer. The evolution of government-led population stabilisation efforts in India goes back to the start of the five year development plans in 1951-52. A national programme was launched, which emphasised ‘family planning' to the extent necessary to reduce birth rates to stabilise the population at...
More »Delhi most unsafe for women, finds UN survey by Shambhavi Rai
If you are a woman living in the Capital and you are perpetually scared of being sexually harassed, you're not alone. About 85 per cent of Delhi's women feel the same way, this according to a survey conducted by the Delhi government along with the United Nations and Jagori, an NGO. The survey was conducted on more than 5000 women in the Capital. According to the study three out of five...
More »The task of making the PDS work by Jean Dreze
The planned National Food Security Act represents a unique opportunity to achieve gains with respect to the public distribution system. However, the current draft is a non-starter. When I first visited Surguja district in Chhattisgarh nearly 10 years ago, it was one of those areas where the Public Distribution System (PDS) was virtually non-functional. I felt constrained to write, at that time, that “the whole system looks like it has been...
More »Farmers, women, SHGs to get priority in food processing aid by Gargi Parsai
Proposal to set up mega food park in each State Three boards to be set up to promote processing of fisheries, soybean and guar gum Food processing industry accounts for 14 per cent of the total industrial output The Food Processing Ministry will give priority to farmers, self-help groups and women for providing grant-in-aid in setting up food processing enterprises. It has also identified Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir...
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