Devise policies to help young girls dream big

It’s been seven years since the PM’s Beti Bachao mission to address the child sex ratio. But, without its corollary, Beti Padhao, reaching its potential, the scheme is incomplete If there was ever a measure of aspiration for young women, it is to be found in the surge in numbers seeking to better their lives through education. (PTI) Of the 1.87 million candidates who registered for The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate) or NEET, India’s largest entrance exam for medical schools, over half, or 1.06 million, were girls and young women. That this has happened in a post-Covid-19 era…

Read More

Why Nagaland continues to shut women out of politics

To understand how sticky attitudes to women in public life can be, you have only to look at Nagaland. In many aspects, the north-eastern state does very well for women: lowest crimes against women; child marriage is virtually unknown (this is true not just for Nagaland but pretty much all of the northeast); and, at 76.11%, female literacy is leagues ahead of the national average of 64.6%. But when it comes to political representation, Nagaland remains stubbornly and determinedly an outlier. In the 2018 assembly elections, five women, the most ever, out of a total of 196 candidates contested. All of them lost with…

Read More

The problem with judgmental gynaecologists

In her first summer break home from the American university where she was studying, K* sought an appointment with a gynaecologist to understand why her periods were irregular. Unlike many doctors, this one skipped the euphemistic are-you-married question and asked directly: “Are you sexually active?” Ok, thought K, so far, so good. Then came the next question: “With goras or desis?” The doctor laughed while asking the question, as if presenting it as a joke would make it less inappropriate or offensive, recalled K. In the backdrop of Roe v Wade there has been no small measure of chest-thumping here in India. The…

Read More

Can Murmu’s election emancipate the tribals?

The election of Murmu cannot be an empty symbolic gesture, mere lip service to inclusion. It must signal a new era where it cannot continue to be business as usual National Democratic Alliance presidential candidate Draupadi Murmu in Patna, Bihar, July 5, 2022 (Santosh Kumar/Hindustan Times) At a time when political parties are queuing up to pledge support to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s official candidate for president, Draupadi Murmu, news from Madhya Pradesh (MP) of another tribal woman, Rampyari Sehariya, being set ablaze for claiming land that belonged to her, couldn’t have come at a worse time.

Read More

The quiet subversion of women at leisure

Surabhi Yadav/women_at_leisure Sometimes they eat mangoes, in other places they chit-chat while cutting grass. Some lie on cool floors on hot summer days as they scroll through their phones, others have their hair oiled. There’s napping. A lot of it. What does women’s leisure look like? When Surabhi Yadav got on to Instagram in 2018 it was with one short objective: To really get to know her mother, Basanti who had died of liver disease in 2013 when Surabhi was 23. “Beyond being a housewife and a mother, who was she? I hadn’t really known her as a person,” she…

Read More

The importance of being Droupadi Murmu

Few would have heard of the 64-year-old Droupadi Murmu before the BJP announced her name as the NDA’s nominee for president of India. But few have been able to ignore the symbolism of her candidature. When she is elected on July 18, she will become India’s first tribal (and second woman) president. It’s a done deal. The NDA alliance headed by the BJP has 49% of the vote. In addition, Naveen Patnaik’s BJD and Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSR Congress have already pledged support. Others are likely to follow the lure of the powerful optics of what her election will mean.…

Read More

Indian women’s unquenchable search for water

The woman in the purple sari climbs one agonising step after another, scaling up the wall of the well. At its bottom, another woman scoops a few cups of water into her bucket. This will then be hoisted by ropes by people waiting above, while she will clamber up the same perilous route, using iron level markers as steps. There is no safety net or harness. Shot by ANI in Gusiya village, Dindori, Madhya Pradesh, the now viral video is emblematic of the water crisis staring at India in one of the hottest summers in memory. This is not the…

Read More

Pride Month is as good a time as any to ask, what next?

By Saurabh Kirpal The summer of ’69, as the song by Bryan Adams proclaims, were the best days of his life. Sadly, life wasn’t quite as good for the LGBTQI+ community in the June of that year when, faced with consistent police brutality, riots broke outside the iconic Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York. The riots lasted six days and marked the first time that the queer community stood in the open and fought rather than hide in the shadows. That act of defiance in now commemorated as Pride Month not only in the US, but across the…

Read More

Mithali Raj’s impact went beyond cricket

Raj normalized the idea of girls at play in a deeply patriarchal society where the sight of girls on the field is still rare. Kitted out or not, she told these girls and their parents that it was ok for them to kick a ball or twirl a racket Mithali Raj bats during the Women’s Cricket World Cup match between South Africa and India at Hagley Oval in Christchurch, March 27, 2022 (AFP) When Mithali Raj made her debut in cricket in 1999, women role models in any field were hard to find. There was Indira Gandhi who remains an…

Read More

What the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard verdict tells us about the price of speaking up (and related cautionary tales)

The seven member jury, two women and five men, in a Virginia courtroom has reached a verdict after a six-week trial. Both actors are liable for defamation but Depp has been awarded a significantly higher amount of US$15 million (reduced to $10.35 million to conform with Virginia law) to Heard’s $2 million. Heard has said she is ‘heartbroken’ by the decision; her lawyers say she can’t afford to pay and will appeal. Here are some takeaways from the verdict. Can men be victims of domestic abuse? Yes they can, and are. Statistics tell us that one in three women worldwide,…

Read More

How sex workers won the right to dignity

Declaring that the ‘basic protection of human decency and dignity extends to sex workers and their children’, a three-judge Supreme Court bench of Justices L. Nageshwar Rao, B.R. Gavai and A.S. Bopanna has made a slew of recommendations to protect these rights. Beyond the recommendations, is the unequivocal recognition of adult sex workers as equal citizens deserving of the same rights as anyone else. “Sex workers are treated like non humans even though they are in work that is not illegal,” said senior advocate Anand Grover who represented the Darbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a sex worker collective based in Kolkata. “The…

Read More

Anatomy of a fake encounter

On the night of November 27, 2019, a 26-year-old veterinary assistant surgeon working at a state-run hospital was returning home in Shamshabad, Telangana when she called her sister at 9.22 pm to tell her that her two-wheeler scooter had a flat tyre. She was scared, she told her sister. That was the last time anyone ever heard from her. The next morning her charred body was found near the toll booth from where she had called. She had been raped and then murdered. The brutal crime caused a national uproar. It turned out that the police had not immediately responded…

Read More
1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 58 59 60 61
Scroll to Top