Social Issues

Retail inflation hardened in June to a three-month high of 4.81%, from May’s 4.31%, driven by a spike in food price gains due to the rising costs of items like cereals, pulses, milk and tomatoes. Food price inflation quickened to 4.5%, from less than 3% in the previous month. June …

With the situation worsening in violence-hit Manipur, the state government authorised all District Magistrates to issue “shoot at sight orders” in “extreme cases”. A shoot-at-sight or firing order may be passed in terms of the statutory powers relating to the arrest or prevention of offences or for disbanding unlawful assemblies under the CrPC, 1973. Section 144 of the CrPC enables …

One District One Product-Districts as Export Hubs (ODOP-DEH) has mapped and tagged the overlapping products in Taj Hotels’ in-house luxury store, Khazana. The launch of this initiative was held in New Delhi today. On the occasion the ODOP-DEH launch and appreciated the variety of products on display, from across the …

PACS are village level cooperative credit societies that serve as the last link in a three-tier cooperative credit structure headed by the State Cooperative Banks (SCB) at the state level. Credit from the SCBs is transferred to the district central cooperative banks, or DCCBs, that operate at the district level. …

The New York-headquartered International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) became the latest to join the list of tech companies that have made large-scale layoffs since late 2022. The company said it would be laying off about 3,900 employees. This comes on the heels of what has been described as Big Tech’s …

Work carried out by researchers from the Integrated Cancer Genomics Laboratory atthe Advanced Centre for Training, Research, and Education in Cancer (ACTREC) in Mumbai’s Tata Memorial Centre has shed more light on the molecular mechanism through which progesterone treatment prior to breast cancer surgery is quite likely to increase the …

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court announced that it would examine whether minor girls, as young as 15 years, can marry on the basis of custom or personal law when such marriages are considered an offence in statutory law. The legal age for marriage is 18 years for women and …

India’s campaign in its second consecutive hockey World Cup at home had a dream start when local boy Amit Rohidas scored a brilliant goal in front of a packed house and the host beat Spain 2-0 at the spectacular new Birsa Munda Stadium in hockey hub Rourkela. Ten days later, …

A majority of survivors interviewed from Tamil Nadu as a part of the research project Surviving Violence: Everyday resilience and gender justice in rural-urban India shared their domestic violence experience for the first time after the incident took place in six to twelve months. The research project carried out in Tamil Nadu, …

Several children are presenting with symptoms of cough at paediatric centres across the city. Paediatricians, who are seeing a steady flow in outpatient units, said these were primarily viral respiratory infections. A senior doctor at the Institute of Child Health and Hospital for Children said there was a small increase …

The difference lies in being able to ‘eat’ viruses to fulfil one’s biological imperatives. Plankton of the genus Halteria, they claim to have found, can each consume 10,000 to a million virus particles a day, increase their population using the metabolised energy, and provide more food for the zooplanktons that …

For around 70 lakh pensioners, the end to the agonising wait for higher pension under the Employees’ Pension Scheme (EPS), 1995, appears to be no where in sight even though it has been over two months since the Supreme Court of India reiterated, as a matter of principle, its approval …

The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) has completed the process of recruitment of 400 tribal youth from Sukma, Bijapur and Dantewada, the districts worst affected by left-wing extremism in Chhattisgarh. The recruits will join the basic CRPF training in March, a senior government official said. To encourage recruitment from these …

The Centre’s position in the Supreme Court remained uncertain on Tuesday on whether its 1993 notification identifying Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Parsis as minority communities needed reconsideration in light of a view by the National Commission for Minorities that religious and linguistic minority communities ought to be identified State-wise. …

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, ‘Squealer, the small fat pig’ was a brilliant orator who always spoke to the hard-working animals about a ‘readjustment of rations’, but ‘never as a “reduction”’. The Government’s latest announcement on free foodgrains is a case of similar doublespeak. The Cabinet has announced that under the …

Nelson Mandela had said that “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children”. Two global reports released on January 10, 2023 — on child mortality and on stillbirths — prod us to reflect on whether India is doing enough …

The decennial Census of 2021 has been pushed forward yet again and is unlikely to start till September 2023, at least. The Additional Registrar General of India communicated to States on January 2, without specifying a reason, that the date of freezing of administrative boundaries has been extended till June …

The importance of the decennially conducted Census cannot be overstated. As it tallies data on several features of the Indian population, such as basic demography, literacy levels, caste status, educational levels, spoken languages, religion, marital status, occupation, and migration status among others, the Census is vital to administrative functions and …

They know it is an inhuman and demeaning job rooted in caste-based discrimination and passed on to successive generations, but the sanitary workers continue to undertake manual scavenging as employers exploit them, and at times are cruel as well. The workers, the women especially, continue to do so to sustain …

For the next 8 months, there will be Pre summits on the five Y20(Youth 20) themes along with various discussions and seminars at different Universities across states in India in a run up to the final Youth-20 Summit India’s key focus is to bring young leaders from all across the …