Her hair neatly tied back in a bun, the lipstick bright red on her lips, Usha is talking about a typical day in her life. For the single mother of four, Sunday or Monday makes no difference to her routine: Up before dawn, cook and pack school lunch for the kids, a quick bath and then off to work at the first of the four houses where she cleans and cooks. By 3 pm, she’s done and there’s time enough to buy vegetables and daily provisions on her way back home to eat a late lunch and get the dinner…

The issue isn’t just India-Nepal relations. The issue isn’t just the racist treatment of international students by university authorities. The issue isn’t just the desperate backtracking of an inhuman stance by a private university. At its heart there is only one issue. How do institutions respond when women complain about harassment? Prakriti Lamsal, a 20-year-old third year BTech student from Nepal at the Kalinga Institute of Technology (KIIT) was being harassed and blackmailed allegedly by an ex-boyfriend, fellow student, 21-year-old Advik Srivastava. She reportedly complained to the international relations officer who summoned Advik, and let him off with a warning.…

Chandrababu Naidu wants more professional women to join the workforce. To do this, the Andhra Pradesh chief minister said in a LinkedIn post, the state will expand work from home (WFH) opportunities “in a big way, especially for women.” The idea, he continued, is to provide “equal and full access to growth opportunities” particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine). Post pandemic, he pointed out, there has been a shift to remote work, co-working spaces and neighborhood workshops that “create flexible, productive work environments.” Naidu’s comments are welcome for several reasons. First, it acknowledges the challenges that women face in…

A tale from modern India: A man rapes his wife so brutally she dies. She leaves a dying declaration before a magistrate. There’s a post mortem that finds grievous injuries. A trial court sentences the man to 10 years in jail. He appeals and the Chhattisgarh high court acquits him of all charges, rape, unnatural sex and even culpable homicide. Off he goes, free as a bird to live the remainder of his life as he chooses. Our law does not recognize the crime of marital rape. In fact, our rape laws, rewritten under public pressure in 2013, make an…

Some see her as a victim of a domineering and abusive husband. Others assert her right to dress (or not) as she pleases. Bianca Censori, the wife of rapper and designer Ye, the man formerly known as Kanye West, has been notoriously tight-lipped about what she thinks about nudity, the female form, her husband or even, for that matter, the weather. That inscrutable face reveals nothing that the body attached to it so generously reveals. Since she got married in 2023, Censori has almost always been photographed wearing very little by Kanye’s side in what New Yorker calls a “pure,…

There’s a lot to be happy, and hopeful, about the latest ASER or Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) that has since 2005 measured Indian schoolchildren’s ability in reading, writing and arithmetic. Fears that the pandemic, when India had one of the world’s longest school closures, would disrupt learning outcomes and lead to children being pulled out of school have proved unfounded, the survey released earlier this week found The nationwide household survey of 649,491 children in 15,728 schools in 605 districts across 29 states finds that children are not just back to pre-pandemic levels of learning, but have exceeded…

The first uniform civil code in independent India could have been an opportunity to showcase a progressive template for other states. It ought to have restricted itself to marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption and inheritance—areas governed by personal laws that create discrepancy among citizens. Instead, the state of Uttarakhand has taken on the role of Morality Police by inserting a clause that requires couples cohabitating together to register on an online portal. There’s a 16-page form, liability on landlords and certification by a religious leader that the couple is eligible to marry should they so desire. It’s an odd requirement for a…

One billion women around the world are estimated to be out of the purview of the financial sector. Closing the gender gap “would be the right thing to do as a matter of equity alone,” writes Mary Ellen Iskenderian, the president and CEO of Women’s World Banking (WWB), a global non-profit that seeks to provide low-income women access to financial tools and resources. Ensuring women’s independent access to finance has another more profound impact on human development. “There is ample evidence that she will spend that money in ways that contribute directly to the well-being of her family…when money in…

It’s a tiny word, an acronym to be precise, but few topics have been as explosive or divisive as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in Donald Trump’s America. In an election campaign where Trump made race, gender and ‘wokeism’ central issues, promising to rollback DEI initiatives and scoffing at Kamala Harris as a ‘DEI candidate’, no surprises that vast swathes of corporate America has quickly fallen into line with its own announcements. The most recent to join the party is Meta, the parent company for Facebook and Instagram. Days after scrapping its third-party fact-checking programme, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it…

In Kerala, India’s most developed and literate state, an 18-year-old Dalit athlete has revealed to social workers that she has been sexually abused since she was 13 by 64 men. Gang-raped five times in as many years, she says. Let that sink in. At the time of writing, police in Pathanamthitta district have detained 42 people and 30-odd cases have registered. The girl is now in a shelter home, and I can only hope she is receiving the counselling and care she undoubtedly needs. Who are these men? Their ages range between 17 and 47. Their names are Amal, Adarsh, Joji…

Larsen & Toubro chairman SN Subrahmanyan’s advocacy of a 90-hour work week is deeply problematic on so many levels that it merits examination beyond the usual 24-hour social media cycle. In a video on Reddit apparently during an employee interaction the 64-year-old was asked why the multibillion-dollar conglomerate was making employees work on Saturdays. “I regret I am not able to make you work on Sundays…because I work on Sundays,” the CEO retored. Then, he added, “What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife?” A 90-hour, seven-day week works out to just under…

BBC has a list of 100. Financial Times has just 25. But writing from an Indian perspective, viewing India from within, who were the women who made the most impact? Who were those who would not give up whatever it took? And who are the changemakers to remember? These are the women, from India and the rest of the world, who moved me this year. Gisele Pelicot: Breaking the silence By refusing the anonymity allowed to her as a rape survivor under French law, the 72-year-old grandmother is challenging the narrative on how we talk about rape. “It is not…