-The Times of India Tamil Nadu’s alarmingly low sex ratio at birth of 840 in 2016 according to the Civil Registration System could be due to a large number of adults registering their birth in recent years in a bid to get passports made. According to National Health Mission officials in Tamil Nadu, if only the births in a particular year are considered, the state’s sex ratio at birth was a...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Abysmal sex ratios have generally been associated with states like Haryana and Punjab. However, the data for 2007 to 2016 on sex ratio at birth, an indication of which way the sex ratio will move in the coming years, shows that southern states barring Kerala have witnessed some of the most dramatic drops. Data collated by the office of the Registrar General of India from the...

-Livemint.com The Aadhaar project is a textbook example of how not to design and execute a public policy initiative in India When it was first launched in 2009, Aadhaar signalled a promise to repair the corroded plumbing of India’s leaky public delivery systems. The unique biometric identity would help reduce duplicate and ghost entries in the list of beneficiaries of government schemes, and pave the way for direct benefit transfers to them...

-Frontline.in The British government, on the basis of an 1891 report on the subhuman living conditions of “Pariahs” by James H.A. Tremenheere, Acting Collector of Chengleput, assigned 12 lakh acres of land for distribution to the “depressed classes” of the Madras Presidency to empower them socially and economically. But more than 100 years later, much of this land is in the possession of non-Dalits, and the struggle to reclaim them has...

-The Times of India PUNE: Maharashtra's sex ratio at birth dipped by eight points in 2016 as compared to the previous year, according to a report from the state health department. The report says the ratio of newborn girls per 1,000 boys went down from 907 in 2015 to 899 in 2016. The report, which is based on the Civil Registration System under the Birth and Death Registration Act, notes that the...