Till a few years ago, women of Bisha Bedi village in Rajasthan’s Barmer district hardly slept at night. Throbbing pain in the neck and the back kept them awake till early morning. It was caused by fetching water over long distances. “We used to wake up at four in the …
THAT day when Darla Dhanalakshmi suffered severe joint pain and numbness in the limbs she knew something was seriously wrong. She had been suffering from the pain since January after she visited a clinic on the outskirts of Hyderabad. There she was asked to pop an unknown pill. The pain …
Former chief minister of Tamil Nadu M Karunanidhi, recovering from a historic drubbing in the recent assembly polls, might find solace in the superlative his home constituency earned during the election. Kilvelur assembly constituency in Nagapattinam district has recorded the highest turnout of women voters in the state—95.57 per cent. …
4,531 men, 3,403 women and 25 transgenders had tested HIV positive In 2010, Coimbatore was in second place Awareness programme to be conducted COIMBATORE: Coimbatore district has 8,359 HIV positive people, including 17 prisoners, Collector M. Karunakaran said on Thursday. Speaking at a meeting of the District Welfare Co-ordination Committee …
In 1998, Kathryn Bolkovac, a US police officer on deputation with the UN’s International Police Task Force in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was put in charge of a project aimed at fighting violence against women. She encountered a battered young woman who was not from the Balkans. She spoke neither English nor Bosnian, …
To win the trust of people of Pakistan, USAID is allotting US $20 million to the Lahore-based Rafi Peer theatre group to create an Urdu version of the children’s show Sesame Street. Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit which owns Sesame Street, is collaborating with the theatre group. Newsweek Pakistan quoted Imraan …
Money matters and no one knows it better than Murlidhar Dhurve, a 55-yearold farmer in Maharashtra suffering from hypertension for almost four years now. “I sustained chest injuries in an accident four years ago. It was then that doctors at the hospital said I was also suffering from high blood …
IN 2004, residents of West Virginia, US, accused a chemical manufacturing company of contaminating drinking water supply in the region with a fluorinated organic compound. Perfluorocarbons (PFCs) are man-made chemicals used to produce teflon, found in countless household products like non-stick cookware, pizza and popcorn boxes. The accumulation of PFC …
India is home to 1,210 million people, almost equal to the combined population of the US, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Japan (1,214 million) India is the most populous nation after China (1,342 million). India hosts 17.5 per cent of the world’s population compared to China’s 19.4 per cent. Of …
The much-awaited provisional results of Census 2011 bring the news that the child sex ratio (0-6 years) has declined further from 927 to 914 girls for every 1,000 boys, due to a widening of the circle of daughter aversion, especially across western and central India. But in all the monitoring …
En chemin elle rencontre (On the way, she met), a collection of comic strip stories tackling the issue of violence against women edited by Marie Moinard, director of the small publishing company Des ronds dans l’O, was officially launched with Amnesty International France on International Women’s Day. Its title is …
CHILDREN who attain puberty early may have less chances of getting osteoporosis later in life. This information may help Indians take precautionary steps, as one in every three women above 45 years has osteoporosis, a survey conducted by Arthritis Foundation of India states. Statistics with the International Osteoporosis Foundation shows …
This paper presents the first results of a study conducted on subjective expectations that parents have about the costs and returns to education. This is done by using a detailed child-level dataset from the three villages of Dokur (Mahbubnagar district, Andhra Pradesh), Kalman and Shirapur (Sholapur district, Maharashtra). The perceived …
The rapidly changing demography of Jharkhand, a state carved out of Bihar in 2000, has given a disturbing twist to the panchayat elections held in the region after more than three decades. Perhaps for the first time in the country, there were no candidates even to file nominations in a …
THE Union health ministry is again considering introducing injectable contraceptives in the family planning programme. The ministry has asked its Drug Technical Advisory Body (DTAB) to allow use of Depot Medroxyprogesterone Acetate (DMPA) in the programme. An earlier attempt to introduce it was withdrawn in 1995 after Supreme Court’s intervention. …
ON March 9, the country's leading industry captains, attending the first meeting of the Assam Investment Advisory Board in Guwahati, said they were impressed by the emergence of a
Ega Mounika was born into debt, lived in debt and died with debts. The college-going 20-year-old of Warangal’s Karimabad village immolated herself on September 25; three days later, she died. “My daughter wanted to release us from debt,” said her father Laxmi Narayan who sustained burn injuries trying to rescue …
The total demand for micro-credit in the country has been estimated at Rs 50,000 crore. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) estimates that in 256 of India’s 626 districts the credit gap is at least 95 per cent or more. Most mfis are concentrated in these districts, including two of …
A recent civil society-led investigation has highlighted serious ethical violations in a trial of the Human Papilloma Virus vaccine on girls in Khammam district in Andhra Pradesh. The findings are presented along with a review of clinical trials of the hpv vaccine in India and an analysis of the Drugs …
One of the great acumen of those living close to nature is that they know exactly when nature offers a gift. Soon after the first shower in the month of Shravana, which usually falls between July and August, tribal women along the hilly border of Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh set out …
