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Cash can't end discrimination Will the recently announced cash incentives to poor mothers giving birth to girls really help to discourage female infanticide, female foeticide or the pervasive neglect of girl-children? More... Water warsShaken by the magnitude of water stress, and the conflicts surrounding it, award-winning filmmaker Urmi Chakraborty has made a hard-hitting new documentary on water More... Tracking the Drought-I Kutch: The story of a tortoise in distress
Do we have 2 million or 20 million HIV-positive in India? Or is there a plateuing of the epidemic? Speculative and alarmist figures about the number of Indians affected by HIV/AIDS have added to public confusion and affected the programme's credibility. This is the first in a series of articles on the issues and controversies surrounding HIV in India More... Mum's the wordIn a society which reveres motherhood, deifies the mother in mythology and popular cinema, mothers in India have hardly any legal rights over their children. The Tamil Nadu order making it mandatory for schools to list the mother as joint or sole guardian of the child, is a small but significant change More... DEBATE: Is Electroconvulsive therapy still relevant in psychiatric treatment?Presenting two sides of an ongoing public health debate More... 325-year-old Dutch work on Kerala's plant wealth revived325 years after its publication in Amsterdam, the 'Hortus Malabaricus' (Garden of Malabar), a treatise on the medicinal plants of southern Kerala state, has been translated from old Latin into English. The translation unlocks a wealth of information for historians, botanists and medical researchers. But will it also help the biopirates? More... R&D-shy Indian firms may trip over drugs patentsIndia is introducing new patent laws that will stop its drugs industry from making cheap versions of patented drugs. What this means for India's poor, and other developing countries dependent on India for inexpensive medicines, is uncertain. What is clear, though, is that India's companies are unlikely to start developing new drugs themselves - the cost is just too high More... Scrap-collectors fight for and win a new legitimacyThe scrap-collectors union of Pune in Maharashtra has given waste-collectors who scoured garbage bins and collected old newspapers and bottles a new respectability and access. The municipal corporation now issues identity cards to them and offers a limited health insurance plan, recognising their contribution to recycling waste in the city More... Green gold: Commercial organic cottonIn Part II of her series on organic cotton, Meena Menon travels to Vidarbha in Maharashtra and to Madhya Pradesh, where the organic cotton chain leads all the way to the fashionable ecological-social retail stores of Europe. The message? Organic cotton commands a premium and makes good commercial sense. It can also reduce the cost of inputs and save the lives of desperate farmers More... A giant leap backwardsPublic figures in America are using September 11 to throw basic human rights out the window More... Participatory water management requires the involvement of millionsVanarai Bunds, erected at virtually no cost by using empty cement bags across nullahs and rivulets, have proved most effective in watershed management, writes Mohan Dharia. Around 36,000 such bunds have been constructed in Maharashtra by local communities since the monsoons of 2002 More... Legislating for change: Articulating women's rightsVarious legislations pertaining to women's rights are hanging fire, including the one on sexual harassment at the workplace. Others such as the Protection from Domestic Violence Bill 2002 are glaring examples of the co-option and dilution of serious issues More... Greening cotton: Finally, a loss of faith in chemical agricultureMeena Menon travels through the cotton fields of Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh where, hurrah, farmers are slowly switching back to organic farming More... |
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All the surface water sources in the vast and desolate flatlands of Kutch, Gujarat, are bone dry. The groundwater tables are falling at alarming rates. How do communities survive the drought here? This is the first in a series of articles tracking the drought | Microsites | ||||||
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