Vina Mazumdar refers to herself as "grandmother" of women's studies in India. She was secretary of the Committee on Status of Women in India that brought out the first report on condition of women in the country, Towards Equality. She was co-founder of Centre for Women's Development Studies, an institution that has influenced the course of women's studies in India. Quite the firebrand even today at 80, she is disarmingly...

Why do poor people in rural areas vote when they know the whole system is against them? JEAN DRÈZE talks to some voters and observes the voting process during the recent Assembly elections in Latehar district, Jharkhand, and comes away with some pointers...  At one booth (Rankikalan, Booth No. 69) a BJP activist was trying to influence voters before they entered the booth, under the guise of helping them. Latehar...

Women’s groups, organisations and individuals have appealed to Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily to amend the laws on sexual violence at the earliest, arguing that there is an urgent need for strict and exemplary action against any state functionaries who conspire to deny justice to victims of sexual violence. The organisations and individuals, coming under the banner of ANHAD, called for a time-bound national discussion on ways to democratically advance...

We Indians implicitly believe in India’s great past. Recently, that past has been given a statistical underpinning by Angus Maddison. To celebrate the beginning of the 21st century, Maddison wrote a book called The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. There he says that India was the world’s largest economy in the first millennium AD. It produced one-third of the world’s income in the first century, and 29 per cent in...

Even a cursory glance at the daily newspaper reveals the economic mindset and the manipulation of that mindset into losing its sense of balance and well-being by the plethora of reports, articles and stories on the economic life of the Indian nation. There are all sorts of stories, statistics, credit appraisals, banking trends, FDI investment couched in the jargon of the modern economy that, curiously enough, seems to be so...