AROUND ten years ago, at 10 pm, a friend of mine was walking home from the bus-stop, a distance of about a kilometre, in Yelahanka, a suburb of India’s IT city, Bangalore, now called Bengaluru. A man touched her cheek as he passed by, leaving her stunned, frightened, humiliated. Shaken, she wept on her way home.

WHEN yougrow up, you can be whatever you want to be.” Little girls in the United States hear this all the time and everywhere they go, they’re encouraged to believe that girls are equal to boys. But for little girls in developing countries, the message is just the opposite. That is, if they’re allowed to live to become little girls.

WOMEN constitute about 48% of the population in India, but their participation in economic activity accounts for only 34%. There is also a continuing concentration of women in low paid and low status occupations, which indicates that women are marginalised in the labour force. There is a common assumption that men are the breadwinners and that most work done by women is either done in their leisure time or they serve merely as procurers of supporting income for the family.

EVERY WOMAN was elated that India is on the road to becoming a developed nation by the year 2020 with an emancipated female force contributing to the success story. But on January 24, 2009, this dream diminished when an extremist right-wing group of 40, assaulted young educated women — minding their own business — in a pub in Mangalore, Karnataka, giving rise to the alarming prospect of “Talibanisation” of India, on the lines of Afghanistan where women are banned from studying and acid attacks on non-burkha clad girls and women are common.

MAKONI PAYENG, 25, belongs to the Mishing tribe, one of the most fascinating plains tribes in Assam. A mother of two, she lives in Majuli, the largest river island in the world. The island is in the midst of the mighty river Brahmaputra, and lies around 350 kilometres from the state capital of Guwahati.

THE MOVEMENT for the Right to Information (RTI), born in Rajasthan in the mid-nineties, caught the imagination of ordinary people. Initiated by villagers under the banner of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathana (MKSS), a grassroots non-party organisation, the movement spread like wildfire. People began demanding information and holding public hearings on issues like expenditure on roads and school buildings, land deeds and the functioning of health centres

Through an unusual employment generation initiative, the women of East Midnapore in West Bengal have become the driving force behind the achievement of 100 percent sanitation in the district

The VHP and Bajrang Dal have launched a concerted campaign, alleging that Christian missionaries convert tribal people by offering blandishments, but these tribals are only looking for a better life.