Namita Bhandare

There are 6,57,800 sex workers in India, according to a 2016 UNAIDS study. Other estimates put the number at three million. The lockdown and social distancing measures have pushed them to the edge. NGO workers hand over dry ration to sex workers, Pune , June 23, 2020(Ravindra Joshi/HT PHOTO) In March, Jayashree Patil learned that […]

Arranged or otherwise, marriage in modern India continues to be bound by rigid social-economic-caste structures While marriage remains an inevitable goal in most societies and certainly in our own, a new generation of Indian women is changing the rules(Shutterstock) One critic calls it “this year’s scariest horror show about arranged marriages”. And on social media,

Gendered language is not just an annoyance. It can harm Facebook’s 71 gender options, including the two-spirit person, are a stretch. But “they”, used by singular non-binary gender identity people, was Merriam-Webster’s word of 2019 and India has recognised “other” as an official gender since 2014(Shutterstock) Last week, my friend Kanta Singh took issue with

The risk of girls dropping out of school in large numbers is real. The time to act, plan and stop a predictable slide is now. In India, 320 million children have been affected by school closures caused by the coronavirus disease (Covid-19). Online classes do not factor in the country’s digital divide where 16% females

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted an old problem of the mistreatment of women in the labour room The mistreatment of women in the labour room is fairly common, especially if you’re poor(Diwakar Prasad/ Hindustan Times) Don’t touch me, the nurse yelled at the woman who was about to deliver her second child. On March 26,

Demonising doctors and families who force individuals to undergo conversion therapy is the easy bit. The far harder part is the work that must go into building an affirmative society that is respectful of individual choice In 2018, the Indian Psychiatric Association clarified that homosexuality is not a mental illness but stopped short of calling

If sex education is such a loaded term, call it something else — value education, life skills, consent education — but we can no longer ignore how desperately we need it in India’s school curriculums. Projects such as The Consent Project seek to create awareness about legal protections and prohibitions. They challenge norms about what

Before Covid-19, women with disabilities were already undergoing their own lockdown, invisible and shut out from the rest of the world. Now, the walls are closing in. An Afghan woman with a child waits for alms in front of closed shops during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Kabul, Afghanistan April 23, 2020. REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail(REUTERS)

As the world battles the pandemic, it cannot be a coincidence that countries headed by women — Taiwan, Germany, New Zealand — are doing comparatively well. In Taiwan, President Tsai Ing-Wen’s early intervention, including screening passengers from Wuhan, limited the outbreak to 393 infections and six deaths. Six days before Kerala recorded its first coronavirus