Despite recent amendments made to the marriage laws in India, there still remain loopholes which ensure it remains a lopsided bargain for women. Will the recent amendment to the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and the Special Marriage Act, 1954, protect women’s rights? Or will an easy divorce without adequate rights in matrimonial property and clear financial safeguards, leave an increasing number of women facing lengthy judicial processes for any tangible maintenance...

-The Times of India UPA's flagship rural guarantee scheme is performing fitfully in terms of work days, wages and coverage, amply confirming rural development minister Jairam Ramesh's fears that the programme has become a scheme for digging ditches. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee, UPA's outreach to the poor, is not meeting critical parameters and is crying out for reform with questions about the utility a Rs 36,000-crore a year budget...

A narrow education is making engineers oblivious to the importance of human interaction and raising the cost of even simple tasks My time in South Asia has rewarded me with an enigma: why is engineering so expensive here? Why is it often many times more expensive than in Australia, my home? My search for answers led me to shanty towns on the fringes of mega-cities. We compared an award winning Indian factory...

-The Christian Sciences Monitor Wealthy Western nations are financially exhausted and unwilling to commit to help fund greener development for poorer nations. Will this week's conference in Rio find any solutions? So what happens if you hold a UN conference on sustainable development, and world leaders make speeches, and sign treaties, and then nothing happens? This, of course, would be absurd. The problem, says Bill Easterly, a development expert at New York University,...

-The Indian Express Only the names of the patients have changed. Acute encephalitis syndrome is back in Bihar, hitting the same districts as every year, its victims once again mostly children of Mahadalit communities living in various degrees of poverty, their resistance levels lowered by malnutrition and exposure to heat. And the government response has been repetitive to the point of being ritualistic. It has asked for Central assistance and set up...