-The Business Standard   But there's work still to be done The government’s decision to geographically split India between two contending registry projects — the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and the National Population Register (NPR) — is intended to save on the wastage that would result from duplicate data collection. Now they will use each other’s data, though duplication cannot be entirely avoided – as P Chidambaram, the Union home minister,...

-The United Nations Cooperatives and producer organizations will be increasingly important in efforts to eliminate hunger and reduce poverty, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said today. “FAO needs strong cooperatives and producer organizations as key partners in the effort to eliminate hunger for some 925 million people, and to respond to the many challenges that face our world today,” said Director-General José Graziano da Silva. He told...

In the absence of legislation to protect women from sexual harassment at the workplace, the Supreme Court in 1997 laid down guidelines in the Vishaka vs State of Rajasthan in 1997. Thirteen years later, Parliament came up with the “Protection of Women against Sexual Harassment at Workplace Bill, 2010”. However, the Bill sees sexual harassment at the workplace not as a criminal offence but as a mere civil wrong, the...

Without equality, democracy and social justice, which are three interrelated factors, secularism cannot exist as a positive value in society. I HAVE known Prof. Romila Thapar for about 45 years, most of it as a colleague at the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Romila, as she is called by almost everybody – from her eight-year-old grandnephew to all of us present here – had helped to...

The lone Indian activist on the 2011 TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, Aruna Roy has been more successful than most,  when it comes to getting the government’s attention. The Chennai-born former bureaucrat who was an instrumental force behind the revolutionary Right to Information Act has also been credited by the government for “incorporating strong citizen entitlements” in the ambitious National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). A constant...