Going by just the number of countries, the global average for the age of consent is 16. The government's proposal of criminalizing consensual sex with any person below 18 will put India in the company of countries such as Rwanda, Uganda, Chile, Peru and Egypt, none of whom can be counted among liberal democracies. While the age of consent across the world ranges from 13 to 18, the bulk of the...

-Reuters Rome: Governments are failing to fund projects to improve access to toilets and other sanitation services in poor countries because the subject remains "taboo", a director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said on Monday. "Who wants to talk about shit?" asked Frank Rijsberman, Director of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene at the $ 34 billion charitable foundation, during an interview with Reuters on Monday. "It's the last big taboo and as...

-The Telegraph From July 1, TV viewers in the four metros will for the first time have a choice over which channels to watch and not have it decided for them by multi-system operators (MSOs) and local cable operators. Also, they will have to pay only for channels they have chosen. The rest of India will have this choice by December 2014 when the digital transmission of cable TV signals becomes mandatory...

When India embarked on its “unique ID” project in the fall of 2010, pledging to distribute unique 12-digit numbers to 1.2 billion people, the hope was that hundreds of millions of Indians who don’t have a passport, driver’s license or other credible identity document would get one – and with it, a ticket to essential government and private sector services. A new survey led by Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New...

If the Bill seeking to protect children from sexual offences is passed by Parliament in the form in which it was cleared last week by the Cabinet, then there will be a direct but unstated conflict between the general and special laws on rape. Under the special law proposed in the freshly revised "Protection of Children From Sexual Offences Bill" , no person below 18 years will have the legal capability...