Rights

[By Riti Sinha] Nearly seven years ago, on February 9 2012, a 19-year-old, young teenage girl was returning home with her colleagues after work. All was well, except that she never made it home. She was abducted by three men in a car just a few metres away from home. For the next three days they raped her in the ...

[By Madhumita Pandey] A ten-year-old girl was recently denied an abortion by the Supreme Court of India. She was a victim of rape, which she alleges was perpetrated by her uncle several times over a period of seven months. Her pregnancy was discovered after she complained of stomach ache and was taken to the hospital, but in late July the ...

[By Shashi Tharoor] NEW DELHI – Sixty-six years after adopting one of the world’s most liberal constitutions, India is being convulsed by a searing debate over a colonial-era provision in its penal code, Section 377, which criminalizes “whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman, or animal.” It must be changed. Beyond forcing millions ...

We pretend that people are not condemned to the caste system, Mari Marcel Thekaekara writes. In 1996, I listened in disbelief as Martin Macwan, a dalit leader, told a Delhi gathering, ‘I am ashamed that as a dalit, working with my people for over 10 years, I did not know that balmiki people still carry shit on their heads everyday of ...

[By Pushpa Achanta] Kolar – “The main drinking water pipeline and tank has been built because of the relentless efforts of our women’s collective. That is the reason why this water is called ‘Magazheer Neer’, Tamil for water generated by women. At present, the local panchayat monitors the water supply between 8 to 10 am daily. Each household can manage ...

[By Lavanya Regunathan Fischer & Devadatt Kamat] Delhi – Recently, hundreds of people once again took to the streets of Delhi as part of the annual Queer Pride Parade to drum up support for equal rights for people of diverse gender and sexuality and rally for “collective freedom from patriarchal oppression”. It was only last year that the Supreme Court ...

[By Narendra Kaushik] Delhi: Kavita, the editor of Khabar Lehariya, the weekly in Bundeli, Bajjka, Bhojpuri, Awadhi and Hindustani dialects, has become conscious of a number of things since January this year when Saddam alias Nishu (22), a boy from Sonbhadra District, began stalking her and her team on phone. Kavita has come to realise that Nishu could harass her and four of her colleagues because ...

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara] Adivasi (or indigenous Indian) Premila Tirkey has been awarded £184,000 ($280,000) by a British employment tribunal in compensation for four and a half years of exploitation while she was working as a maid for an Indian family in the UK. It is a landmark judgement. Tirkey worked for Pooja and Ajay Chandhok in Milton Keynes. Her ...

[By Surekha Kadapa Bose] Aurungabad(WFS) – Bent on their looms for hours, days and months, the women of Paithan, a small town near Aurangabad, in Maharashtra, spin a dream world. Lush paddy fields, swaying palms, blooming lotus flowers, beautiful peacocks, parrots and blue-tailed birds in flight are created on a rich silk background with a dhoop-chaanv (light and shade) effect ...

[By Zsuzsanna Gal ] In a small Kenyan village called Umoja are only women allowed to live. The whole single-sex community was founded in 1990 by a group of 15 women who were survivors of rape by local British soldiers. Umoja’s population has now expanded to include any women escaping child marriage, FGM (female genital mutilation), domestic violence and rape ...