Women

The rash of rapes and cases of molesations in the country continue to paint India as among the worst countries for women to live in, but research finds it otherwise. The incidence of sexual violence in India and Bangladesh are among the lowest in the world. It is, not surprisingly, the bloodiest in central sub-Saharan Africa. Worldwide, one in 14 women (7.2 per cent) aged 15 years or older report being sexually assaulted by someone other than an intimate partner at least once in their lives...

And when they came for the men, there was nothing left to complain about. The men in question were three unsuspecting individuals who were attacked by detractors in Hubli last week. All three men were victims of acid attacks; and the fact that acid can be easily procured perhaps had made the incidents appear more facile. Yet, the consummate ease with which acid can be bought from hardware or even grocery stores, is something that campaigners have been screaming hoarse against all these years...

Minutes after I had put up a status message on Facebook saying that I was planning to pen first-hand accounts of domestic violence survivors, I was flooded with messages. Among those who responded was my friend, Nargis Yousuf *, from Bangalore. Er, was she a victim? No. But she had an account of someone. “Would you need the person to narrate it herself? As in, meet her?”, she asked. I thought otherwise. “But she won’t be able to speak to you here (on Facebook).”, Nargis added. So, was this...

An ill-conceived move by the Karnataka government allowing the extension of working hours for women working in the IT industry in Bangalore is drawing flak both from women and IT professionals. IT companies in Bangalore at a recent conference had adopted a resolution urging the government to extend working hours deadline for female employees to 10 pm. Till now IT/ITeS companies were responsible for providing transport to female employees after 8 pm. "Extending the deadline will make them...

India is simply not doing enough for its women. The country has fallen by one rank &mdash from 112 out of 134 countries in 2010 to 113 out of 135 countries &mdash according to the Gender Gap Index 2011 released by the World Economic forum (WEF) on Wednesday. Over the last six years, while 85 per cent of countries are improving their gender equality ratios, for the rest of the world the situation is declining, most notably in several African and South American countries. The sixth annual World...

Plans are afoot to celebrate the birth of a girl on October 31 as the world’s 7 billionth child near Lucknow, the capital of India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh. Plan International is using the occasion to draw world attention to India’s growing gender gap. The world’s emerging economic superpower, estimated to overtake China to become the most populous nation by 2030, has 7 million girls ‘missing’ from its population. Hundreds of thousands of female foetuses are terminated in India...

A 30-year-old woman was repeatedly gangraped by security forces for a week during August in the Saranda forests of Jharkhand. Jawans of the anti-Naxal Cobra force captured her house, and made her to live with and cook for them. Today, she does not dare speak out against the barbarity since the jawans subsequently arrested her son for being a Maoist. She fears more for the life of her son, than speaking out against the atrocity that was heaped on her. This woman’s story is not an isolated one...

Reported violence against Indian women is on the rise. But that’s not because of what you think. A recent study argues that this increase reflects growing willingness to report violence against women, rather than an increase in the incidence of crime. There’s a reason for this too: more women are involved in Indian politics than ever before. The study followed data since the 73rd Amenment to the Indian Constitution that required at least one-third of all seats in local governments to be set...

There was a recent move in the Maharashtra Assembly which did not go down well with anti-abortionists. The state was planning to treat female foeticide as murder, and book culprits under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). On the face of it, it appeared a welcome step towards addressing the skewed sex ratio issue. But delve a bit deep, and the contours of the debate change – for the issue is also a lot about semantics and definitions. Fauzia Khan, minister of state for public health, announced in the...

When Kanupriya Harish took a team from Wells for India around Janadesar village in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur district, it was the routine monitoring visit of a donor agency that had supported a sanitation project in the area. Meeting over, a woman took Kanupriya aside and whispered, “It is because of you that our lives have changed.” That said, she melted away into the crowd. There was no way she could have been recognised – her face was covered, a norm for married women in the desolate landscape of...