columns

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

The silver lining in the Covid-19 shock would be this disruption of India’s business-as-usual labour market. “In the long-term, when companies realise how beneficial work from home is, the biggest beneficiaries would be women,” says Mahesh Vyas, managing director and CEO, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. An ongoing study by researchers at Northwestern University, the

To honour the one who died, we could begin by reclaiming her identity and calling her by her name We made her the braveheart who accepted her martyrdom. A martyr is someone who embraces death, usually for a religious cause(AP) Indian law does not permit the naming of rape victims. Presumably, this is because the

If men and women are to work as equal partners, then we need new rules of engagement, ones that understand the centrality of mutual respect and consent Symbol for gender equality. Hand turns a dice and changes a unequal sign to a equal sign between symbols of men and women.(Getty Images/iStockphoto) Twenty years ago, Abhijit

Women want politicians who will listen to them. The AAP’s work in schools and mohalla clinics, free bus rides for women and subsidies for electricity and water was a major draw. But if Kejriwal really wants to be a game-changer, he might want to end an old bias and recognise that there can be no

In a slum in New Delhi, a group of young women and men are making their city safer Playing together teaches the team respect for each other. It breaks stereotypes. And it teaches the players that public spaces belong to all.(NAMITA BHANDARE) A quiet revolution brews in a narrow lane in one of Delhi’s most

Care work is highly gendered and a barrier to women’s participation in the paid economy. It’s time we changed that Suvarna Santosh Ghate, a 38-year-old housewife who has never held a job, is learning to drive a two-wheeler at a skilling centre in Mumbai where I met her some months ago. It’s an ambitious endeavour

Women have their own perspective based on their struggles to ascension. To exclude them from crucial meetings is to shut out the voices of nearly half of our population Prime Minister Narendra Modi poses for a group photo with Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, Tata Group patriarch Ratan Tata, Business tycoon Anand Mahindra and others