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Women in India have been discriminated against from birth. They are compelled to face many pressures and constraints daily to ensure personal growth, freedom and equality, to live a better and dignified life and help towards an equitable and safe society. Gender sensitisation can help dissipate many of the stereotypes. The patriarchal mindset prevalent in Indian culture is the root cause of sex discrimination. With urbanisation and education, this is now changing. However, there is still a long way to go. Owing to social conditioning and the incidence of strict gender equations, the unequal balance continues.

BHOPAL: Despite Shiv Kumar Sharma 'Kakkaji's" claim that farmers of Madhya Pradesh are participating with great enthusiasm in the agitation against three farm laws, the ground realities are otherwise.

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is getting ready to play the victim card. Ably supported by his intellectual and journalist friends he is planning to project himself before the people of Bihar as a person who has been derided and exploited by the BJP. His friends have already launched the tirade against the BJP of not providing him enough space to function effectively for protecting and promoting the interest of the poor and dalit of the state.

Anniversaries are a mark of looking back and also looking to the future. The world had remembered one year of Covid – 19 outbreaks on January 21, when the first case of Novel Coronavirus was reported in Wuhan. As it spread to other countries, the world woke up, and the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic.

Over-promise and under-delivery has come to stick as a trademark of Nirmala Sitharaman’s performance as finance minister. Despite protestations to the contrary, her latest budget is no exception.

The year of shutdown of the economy which created unprecedented joblessness has been left behind, but the Indian economy will take at least two years to come to the pre-pandemic level, says the Economic Survey 2020-21. If it is true, the budget projections for the year 2021-22 are certainly unrealistic. Even digging deep into the heap of jugglery, one finds only a little. Jobseekers and labours are shrewdly swaddled in hope, but they are let down in reality. The budget has given little assurance to migrant workers and the unemployed.

Sixty-two days of protest and 170 deaths so far—this is a colossal price that farmers have paid to sustain their relentless protest against the Centre’s farm laws ever since they arrived at the gates of Delhi.

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi while addressing the first ‘Mann Ki Baat’ radio programme of the year on Sunday, did not tell the truth to the nation instead blamed the farmers of dishonouring the national flag on Republic Day. The fact is otherwise. The fact of the matter is the tricolour, the pride of the nation, was dishonoured by some unruly elements including pro-BJP men on that fateful day.

The BJP probably thought that the Republic Day mayhem by groups of rowdy and irresponsible farmers in the national capital marked the end of their two-month-long agitation against the three farm laws. The party must have been heartened, therefore, when some of the farmers started leaving their protest sites to return home. To hasten their departure, the electricity and water connections were switched off.

With large fiscal deficit admitted, the Indian economy showing contraction for the third time in our recent history, uncertain future as the pandemic is still active, a vaccination programme just launched, it looks this is the best bargain of a budget that the country could have looked for.