The study was conducted in six States and is based on interviews of over 51,000 individuals  Findings also underscore the limited awareness on most sexual and reproductive matters Leading sources of information on sexual matters were friends and the media Less than one in three women know that a condom can be used just once, and just one in six know that a condom cannot disappear into a woman’s body. These are...

The Centre plans to manacle the RTI Act When the UPA passed the landmark Right to Information Act in 2005, it was meant to empower citizens. The law promised transparency, accountability, and the end of corruption in governance. But in under five years, the government is planning to push through amendments that will dilute the law. Ironically, the amendments are being pushed through in a totally opaque manner. There has been...

The National Commission for Scheduled Castes on Thursday criticised the Tamil Nadu government for high pendency of cases and low conviction rate under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989. Vice-Chairman of the Commission N.M. Kamble, who along with Member of the Commission Mahendra Boddh, conducted a State-level review meeting with Adi-Dravidar Welfare Minister Tamilarasi and senior officials of the government, pulled up the police department...

Issues today have to be dressed up in ways certified by the corporate media. They have to be justified not by their importance to the public but by their acceptability to the media, their owners and sponsors.  That the terrible tragedy in Pune demands serious, sober coverage is a truism. One of the side-effects of the ghastly blast has been unintended, though. The orgy of self-congratulation that marked the media...

By putting an open-ended moratorium on the commercial cultivation of the gene-altered Bt brinjal, environment minister Jairam Ramesh has ended the long-pending uncertainty over this issue. If, despite nine years of testing and safety trials to the satisfaction of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), some genuine concerns about the safety aspects of transgenic Bt brinjal have still been left unaddressed, they surely need to be addressed before the country’s...