India

India: Delhi gang-rape victim still critical, writes on a piece of paper 'Mother, I want to live'.

The 23-year-old girl gangraped on a bus in south Delhi was brutalised so badly that she had only 5% of her intestine left inside her when she was brought to hospital on Sunday night.

On Wednesday, doctors at the Safdarjung Hospital removed the remaining 15 inches of intestine in a bid to stop the spread of a life-threatening infection that had begun to develop in her many injuries.

Why rural sexual violence remains rife in India.

India: Dabra is a typical village in India's rural Haryana state. It has narrow lanes with open drains and small houses built of brick and mud. Children play in the dirt, while men sit around smoking. Not many outsiders visit this poor farming community.But outside one of the houses two policemen stand on guard. Inside, a 16-year-old girl sits in one of the rooms surrounded by women. She is the reason the police are here. Six weeks ago, she was out walking on the street when she was abducted by a dozen men.

INDIA - Acid Attacks Are Living Death For Women, Acid Cheap, Impunity Rampant!

They came in the dead of night, broke into her home as she slept and poured a cocktail of acids over her face -- burning her skin, melting her eyelids, nose, mouth and ears, and leaving her partially deaf and almost blind.

India: Boys' Attitudes Shift On Manhood, Violence Against Women

New International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) findings show that Indian boys’ views about manhood and women’s roles in society became less patriarchal and more equitable after participating in an ICRW program that aimed to shift norms about gender equity.

The program, called Parivartan, drew in boys from Mumbai through the popular sport of cricket and challenged them to question traditional notions of manhood present in many societies, including their own. Results from ICRW’s evaluation provided proof that sensitizing boys to gender issues can potentially change stereotypes they hold and their attitudes about violence against women.

International: 'Workers, Unions and the Left: Responding to the Global Crisis'

I started working on what became this book more than ten years ago, because I felt there was so much confusion in the way that large sections of the trade union movement and the Left responded to globalisation. They took a straightforward anti-globalisation position which, by default, reinforced a nationalist reaction against globalisation. This went against all my Marxist internationalist instincts. Also, having been involved in trade union research for decades, it was obvious to me that many of the evils attributed to globalisation, such as subcontracting and the shifting of production, had been rampant for years or decades prior to it. Most disturbing of all, much of the anti-globalisation rhetoric was indistinguishable from the rhetoric of the extreme Right. (I have given examples of this in my book.)

India: 'Indian SC gives Hindu women equal property rights'

NEW DELHI: A Hindu woman or girl will have equal property rights along with other male relatives for any partition made in intestate succession after September 2005, the Indian Supreme Court has ruled, the Press Trust of India reported.

A bench of justices R M Lodhaand Jagdish Singh Khehar in a judgment said that under the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, the daughters are entitled to equal inheritance rights along with other male siblings, which was not available to them prior to the amendment.

Bina Agarwal

Bina Agarwal is currently Professor of economics and director, Institute of economic Growth, Unversity of delhi, India. Agarwal has written and researched in areas including land, livelihoods and property rights, environment and development, the political economcy of gender, poverty, and inequality and agriculture and technological change. In 29 years of teaching students as well as government officials, she has focused on the interconnectedness of gender, pover and development.

Women’s inheritance rights to land in South Asia: A study of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka

The study reviews the formal and customary laws and practices governing the rights of women to inherit land in six South Asian countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). The study includes an analysis of existing laws and customs and their impact on inheritance and land rights in all six countries. It also provides recommendations for how to design interventions that can attempt to improve women’s inheritance rights.

India: Village bans unmarried women from using mobiles

An Indian village has banned unmarried women from using mobile phones for fear they will arrange forbidden marriages that are often punished by death, a local official said today. The Lank village council decided unmarried boys could use mobile phones, but only under parental supervision, said one council member, Satish Tyagi. Local women's rights group criticised the measure as backward and unfair.

India: Appeal for funds for two acid attack victims

The lives and hopes of Samar (31) and Juwariya (25) Atique were brutally crushed in October 2009 by two men who threw a jug of acid on their faces as the women were returning home from a day's work in a rickshaw. Their crime - Juwariya had turned down a marriage proposal from one of the men! They sustained severe burns and injuries to their faces, their eyes and their upper bodies. In acid attack cases, the victims should be hosed down gently with a continuous stream of water immediately to stop the acid continuing to burn into their flesh. But they did not get treatment for five hours after the incident because the woman doctor was threatened with a similar attack by these men and their families.