Jatland may be basking in the golden glow of women medal winners at the Commonwealth Games but the average Haryanvi continues to disfavour the girl child, posting the worst gender skew in five years. The sex ratio in Haryana has skid to its lowest of 834 girls for 1,000 boys in the age group of 0-6 years in the past five years. In 2006, it was 857 girls for 1,000 boys...

The Election Commission was the first to do it, and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has followed the example — the transgenders of India are finally being recognised by its government. Enrolment forms of the UIDAI will have a third column — ‘T’, for Transgender — along with the ‘M’ and ‘F’ for Male and Female respectively, so that over a million eunuchs can register their unique identities. The EC...

 Adolescent girls from 22 districts of the state will now get Centre’s support to continue education and receive complete nutrition. The Centre has chosen 22 districts from Uttar Pradesh to implement the Rajiv Gandhi Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent girls (RGSEAG-Sabla). To be formally launched across 200 districts in the country from mid-November, the scheme aims to empower out-of-school girls ¿ by educating them and providing them with nutritional support. The Department...

Per capita income, once regarded as the best index of the welfare of a society, has long since been dethroned from this status. People have argued persuasively that it is a measure that ignores not only income distribution but also the quality of life. Alternative approaches have been designed to explore these nuances of measurement and alternative indices constructed. Amartya Sen has developed a ‘capabilities approach’ to the question of...

Latin America, the poster child of bad economic policy in the 1980s and early 1990s, is leading the way in one rapidly evolving area of social development: conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. These schemes provide cash payments to poor households that meet certain behavioural requirements, generally related to children’s healthcare and education. The idea here is to support minimal levels of consumption through income transfers, while encouraging long-term human development. The...