Nearly 65% of adults in the Arab region remain excluded from formal financial systems, according to a new report by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). The Annual SDG Review 2025 paints a sobering picture of persistent financial exclusion that is undermining the region’s ability …
DREAMS are often the crucibles of new ideas. Remember Kekule dreaming up the ringed benzene structure. Margie Profet, too, had one such dream in 1988. She dreamt that menstrual bleeding was a broom that swept away sperm-borne offending microbes from the uterus. Now she has made her dream public, contesting …
NEARLY 37 million people in the United States have no health insurance at all. Meanwhile, the money spent on health care has been rising steadily till last year, it touched $800 billion -- more than 14 per cent of the country's gross domestic product. But all that will be a …
WHEN TECHNOLOGY, tradition and poverty combine to alter the sex ratio in India, who will point a finger and call us murderers? A foreign television network, if it is disposed to spend the time and money turning up evidence in obscure corners of the country. Last month, the BBC did …
AFTER the gut-churning revelations of Let Her Die, a good film on Indian women is a relief. Jhilmili Story, made by K Bikram Singh for the Council for Advancement People's Action & Rural Technology (CAPART), documents the genesis and growth of the Nari Vikas Sangh in Bankura district in West …
FEMALE foeticide and infanticide are not unique to India -- they are prevalent almost globally. They were practised in ancient Greece and were prevalent among certain Arabian tribes until recently. The Yanomani Indians of Brazil still practise it. In India, female infanticide is often attributed to poverty, but the rich, …
FOR MOST girls, fear emanates from an under-the-bed-world. In an experiment in which children aged three to four years were asked about their night-time fears, significantly more girls than boys referred to an underworld peopled with ogres and monsters, says Richard Coss, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis. …
TOBACCO came to India in the 17th century with the Portuguese and today, the plant is grown over as much as half a million hectares in the country. India was one of the first countries in the world to report the adverse health effects of tobacco use. In 1902, the …
UNDER pressure from women's groups, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is under orders to ensure that women and minorities are adequately represented in federally-funded clinical research projects. The requirement, imposed by the US Congress on June 10, 1993, would not apply if the NIH director determines such an …
HOW MUCH oil would be needed to replace all the firewood used in the developing world? According to one set of calculations, just about one-twentieth of all the oil used by the world. But for women in the developing world, access to this oil would mean relief from hours of …
DESPITE its travails, pregnancy is commonly perceived as a delicate give-and-take between a woman and the embryo she carries. But now David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University in Boston, challenges this view by suggesting that conception is a long evolutionary struggle between the mother and the foetus. Says …
A PAKISTANI student has single-handedly started a plantation drive in Karachi. Imran Sultan has planted nearly 70 neem saplings in the past five months in the Karachi Administration Employees' Housing Society complex, and spending PRs 15,000 (Give Indian equivalent) on pits, earth, fertiliser and the wages of a part-time gardener, …
Karnataka: More responsible than men MADHU SARIN IN 1987, more than 14,000 women were elected to mandal panchayats in Karnataka on the basis of a 25 per cent reservation of seats for women. Before the elections, questions were asked about the suitability of women in panchayats. Curiously enough, in many …
WITH SUPPORT from the Ethiopian government, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are implementing programmes to create environmental awareness among the people to counter deforestation that has reached crisis proportions in the mountainous country. The central Ethiopian highlands, which support more than 78 per cent of the population, have been virtually deforested by …
A BIBLIOGRAPHY is useful not only as a guide to further study and research, but also because it gauges the current attitudes and obsessions prevalent in academia. Researchers in the North are slowly waking up to a fact long recognised by activists and writers in the South: that environmental issues …
BASED on a study by a Dutch academic, this book attempts to analyse variations in female employment by examining a cross-section of different forms of production and estimating their impact on women's bargaining power within the household. It suffers, however, from a major weakness: It dwells at length on the …
THE CENTRAL concern of this book is how in a country whose Constitution declares void all laws violative of Article 13 (Fundamental Rights), women continue to be subjected to gender-discriminatory, personal laws. Indian women have been discriminated against on several grounds beside the legal. This is cold comfort to women, …
THERE'S a maxim in Sanskrit that states peacocks in the forest are happy to see clouds in the sky. It's a pointer to the irrefutable fact of life that one cannot keep away from what is dear to one. Something similar happened to Madeleine Slade, popularly known as Mira Behn, …
AFTER years of trying to make family planning enthusiasts understand that population control is not merely condoms, pills and other birth control devices, next year's international conference on population in Cairo nevertheless looks like it will be dominated by, well, condoms, pills and other birth control devices. The second preparatory …
WHEN CHINESE leader Mao Zedong opposed curbs on China's population growth on the ground that productivity of each extra pair of hands outweighed consumption of each additional mouth, international birth control activists were aghast. The country already accounted for about a quarter of all humans on the earth, they said, …
TRADITIONALLY, Indian women have played the role of health care providers. But the reality of their own health is quite a different matter. Adverse sex ratios, higher rates of malnutrition and lower hospital admissions among women in India stand as a sad testimony to the state of their health care. …
