Rural India has been denied access to globalisation, penalising farmers and farm labour. For the farmer, the government's policy is best described as Dhritarashtra's embrace. After the Mahabharata war was over, the old king met his nephews, the victorious Pandavas, and embraced them, one by one, in a gesture of forgiving and affection. When, Bhima's turn came, the loving embrace was so tight that it crushed a metal dummy of the second...

The Sonia-Gandhi led National Advisory Council is pushing to amend the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008 to make it more inclusive and include a comprehensive social security package. The council, which met last month, pitched for a security package that would contain health insurance, maternity assistance, a life-cum-disability insurance scheme and a pension plan that it proposed should be provided through a single window backed by an inter-ministerial committee consisting...

Women today are spending longer in labour than half a century back. After comparing data on nearly 1.4 lakh deliveries between 1960 and 2000, scientists have found that the first stage of labour had increased by 2.6 hours for first-time mothers.  For women who had previously given birth, this early stage of labour took two hours longer in recent years than for women in the 1960s. Infants born in the contemporary...

On Saturday last, as the government was highlighting with much fanfare the achievements under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 in the past two years, the RTE Division of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) — entrusted with the responsibility of monitoring the implementation of the Act — was virtually winding up. It all happened as the term of Kiran Bhatty, the...

Korean steelmaker Posco’s bid to build a 12 million tone integrated steel complex in Jagatsinghpur, Orissa received a major jolt today after a two-judge bench of the National Green Tribunal suspended the environment clearance granted to the project in January 2011.   "The environment clearance granted on January 31, 2011 to the project shall remain suspended till such review and appraisal is done by the ministry," a bench of tribunal comprising Justice...