Are the ChildLine booths for runaway children an attempt to sanitise Indian railway stations or a genuine effort for the protection of 'railway kids'?
Women and Child Development Minister Smriti Irani said that the government is committed to support and protect every vulnerable child who lost both parents to Covid.
A freebie once granted can hardly be discontinued. All that can happen is to substitute it with a bigger freebie, notes A K Bhattacharya.
Here is the complete list of ministers in Modi 3.0 and their portfolios:
It would be difficult to stick to the Budget numbers unless the departments are reined in their expenditure plans.
Among the new entrants to the Union cabinet, former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has been given the agriculture and rural development portfolios, Bharatiya Janata Party president J P Nadda the health portfolio and former Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar the power portfolio.
Gandhi said her ministry has proposed that child sexual abuse victims be allowed to register complaints until they are 30.
The Supreme Court of India has formed a National Task Force (NTF) to address the growing concern of student suicides in higher educational institutions. The court took note of the recurring cases and directed Delhi Police to register FIRs on the complaints of families of two students who died by suicide at IIT Delhi in 2023. The NTF, chaired by former apex court judge Justice S Ravindra Bhat, will prepare a comprehensive report, including the identification of causes leading to suicides, analysis of existing regulations, and recommendations for strengthening protections. The NTF will also have the authority to conduct surprise inspections of higher educational institutions and make further recommendations to ensure a holistic approach to addressing mental health concerns and eliminating suicides.
A day after he hit the spotlight with a comment on parents and sex, trouble mounted for influencer Ranveer Allahbadia on Tuesday with Mumbai police at his doorstep, YouTube pulling down the episode of 'India's Got Latent' and the issue being raised in Parliament.
Shiv Sena-Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray leader Priyanka Chaturvedi on Wednesday took potshots at the rival Shiv Sena over its minister not finding a place in the reconstituted NITI Aayog.
If the international community concentrates on empowering women through gender equality, it will actually be promoting the cause of democracy, mitigating poverty and improving general health, joint secretary in the ministry of women and child development Kiran Chadha told the ongoing session of Commission on Status of Women.
This will be the first full-year Budget of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government since it came to power for a third consecutive term in July last year.
The Odisha government has constituted a fact-finding committee to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of a Nepali student at KIIT University and the subsequent protests by students. The three-member panel will investigate the institute's handling of the situation, including the suspension of students seeking justice. The incident has sparked outrage and raised concerns about the safety of international students at the institute. The Nepal government has threatened to stop issuing no objection certificates for students studying in Odisha if the situation is not resolved.
Experts, however, have raised concern over the decision, saying the move is akin to treating symptoms instead of the underlying causes.
Sushmita Dev said it would have been better if there were more women MPs in the panel.
Women from Mumbai top the list of divorcees across the country in 15-49 age group, says a new government survey. "In Mumbai, 0.4 per cent women in 2005-06 have opted for divorce while in Delhi, it is 0.2. Kolkata and Chennai follows with 0.1 and 0.2 per cent respectively," Women and Child development Minister Renuka Chowdhary told Rajya Sabha, citing the National Family Health Survey (NFHS).
A parliamentary panel has criticized the Indian government for withholding funds from states that have not agreed to implement the PM SHRI schools scheme, calling the reasoning behind the decision "not factual or justified." The panel has recommended the immediate release of pending funds to states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal, which have been significantly impacted by the delays.
The Union law ministry will file a consolidated reply on the issue in the apex court by the end of this month.
The law ministry has red flagged a proposal to provide the National Commission of Women punitive powers to arrest and penalise people guilty of harassing women and ignoring summons.
Sources said the Law Commission held a meeting with the government and sought some information on the matter of age of consent.
The ministry of minority affairs informed the Lok Sabha that in 2022-2023, it had been allotted Rs 5,020.5 crore (Rs 50.20 billion); in the Revised Estimates, it had got Rs 2,612.66 crore (Rs 26.12 billion); and had spent, until the end of March this year, Rs 712.5 crore (Rs 7,12 billion).
Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar was given the finance and planning portfolio on Friday, nearly two weeks after he broke away from the original party and took oath as Maharashtra's deputy chief minister.
It will be interesting to see what shifts have been recorded in the last decade-and-a-half -- from the effects of demonetisation and Covid's second wave to the drop in fertility and increase in farm workers -- but we will only know this if and when the Census is conducted, points out Aakar Patel.
The 28 new ministers who joined the Chouhan cabinet on July 2 include 20 of cabinet rank and eight ministers of state.
India has been mentioned in the report of the Secretary-General on Children and armed conflict since 2010 along with other countries of Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Lake Chad basin, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Philippines for alleged recruitment and use of boys by armed groups in Jammu and Kashmir; detainment of boys by Indian security forces in J&K for their alleged association with armed groups, or on national security grounds.
India ranked 111th out of 125 countries in the Global Hunger Index-2023, which was rejected by the government as erroneous and having malafide intent. The index, released on Thursday, also stated that India has the highest child wasting rate in the world at 18.7 per cent, reflecting acute undernutrition. India ranked 107th out of 121 countries in the 2022 edition of the Global Hunger Index (GHI), a tool for comprehensively measuring and tracking hunger at global, regional, and national levels.
"After baby Saraswati @ Sherin Mathews' case, have requested minister for women and child development for a thorough investigation into the adoption process," External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj tweeted on Friday.
Atishi will have a brief tenure in office as assembly elections in the national capital are due in February.
As many as 37 ministers have been dropped from the government in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's third term and these include seven with cabinet rank -- prominent among them being Smriti Irani, Anurag Thakur and Narayan Rane.
The Supreme Court on Friday refused to entertain a PIL seeking a direction to all the states to frame rules for menstrual pain leave for female students and working women at their respective workplace, observing that the issue falls under the policy domain of the government.
Besides Pratapgarh, incidents of rape and sexual abuse of women and girls at shelter homes run by NGOs have also surfaced recently in Muzaffarpur in Bihar and Deoria in Uttar Pradesh.
'The global climate system doesn't look at where the carbon dioxide is coming from. 'It may be emitted by the US, but it will not remain above the US alone but covers the whole world.'
The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notice to the central government and others seeking gender-neutral, religion-neutral, uniform grounds of succession and inheritance for all citizens throughout the country.
Signalling both change and continuity, India's new government, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a third consecutive term, got into work gear on Tuesday with cabinet ministers and ministers of state filing into their respective offices to assume charge.
Those transferred include special secretary of health and family welfare Udit Prakash Rai, a 2007 batch IAS officer of AGMUT cadre.
Kumar, a 1992-batch Indian Administrative Service officer of Tamil Nadu cadre, is currently an additional secretary in the ministry of electronics and Information Technology.
On the occasion of International Day of Yoga, Mirza, who is expecting her first child in October, posted a photo of her performing yoga on Twitter and tagged Maneka Gandhi and the Ministry of Women and Child Development to it.
In an ambitious initiative aimed at empowering women, the government has proposed to set up an exclusive bank for women having branches across the country which may see merging of the Bharatiya Mahila Bank launched last year by the UPA government.
Being made a member of the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs makes her an important player in BJP politics, observes Rashme Sehgal.
Seeking apology on a controversial government advertisement released in the national print media, India's junior Minister for Women and Child Development Krishna Tirath said she had set up a committee to probe the lapses.
