“I have been rolling beedis since I was fifteen. Our whole community is dependent on the profession. Our employers underpay us, our pension never arrives without a struggle and the state is oblivious to our condition- where do we go from here?” said Aysha Begum, a Beedi worker  from Sengottai in Tenkasi district of Tamil Nadu. Aysha is  now the sole breadwinner for her family of five after her  husband was left incapacitated to work due to a heart ailement. Even after rolling 500 beedis a day, she earns Rs 150, barely allowing her to make ends meet. About 71% of beedi

Uttarakhand is home to the fierce ‘Chipko Movement.’ Led by the bold and spirited women in the 1960s, the movement was one of the many significant attempts to bring to light the relationship between women’s rights and environmental justice in its fight against large scale deforestation.In recent times, we see inspired and motivated elected women representatives in Gram Panchayats ( India’s elected village councils) carrying forward the legacy of the Chipko movement as they rally around to strengthen the unique Uttarakhandi institution of Van Panchayats (forest councils).In early 2017, during the course of several meetings organized by The Hunger Project,

“These capitalists will ruin us,” thundered Charanjeet Kaur, a thirty nine year old farmer with a medium landholding of 12 acres (4 hectares) from Wara Bhaika village in Faridkot district of Punjab. “Instead of bridging the gap between the rich and poor, government is trying to get rid of the poor altogether,” she told BehanBox on a mid December morning at Tikri on the Delhi-Haryana border–one of the two sites of the groundswell of protests against the new farm laws legislated by the Government of India.Sat beside her, Manjeet Kaur (40), a small farmer with 2 acres (0.8 hectares) landholding

More women are engaging in making decisions within their households, are owning and using bank accounts and mobile phones which reflects greater agency  that they are able to exercise. However, fewer women are now owning property either jointly or alone (land and house) than in 2017 in several states across India, according to data from the first phase of the latest round of National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) released by the Government of India  in December 2020. The data released for 22 states and Union Territories (UT) of India, also shows that more rural women have ownership of land and

Transgender persons in India’s prison systems  remain invisible among all the vulnerable groups, with their rights and dignity as citizens denied, according to a new report “Lost Identity: Transgender Persons Inside Prisons” by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) and  University of Dundee.Take the case of Ishu, a transwoman, who was incarcerated when she was 19 in  Bengaluru Central Prison on charges of attempted murder and abduction in 2017. Inside the prison, she developed a serious infection after a breast augmentation surgery a few months prior to her arrest. Her situation worsened as the prison officials administered generic painkillers. She

As India announced one of the harshest lockdowns in the world, among the many groups that remained invisible in the government policy announcements were menstruating persons. Hygiene essentials for menstruating persons were missed out in the essentials list of items and services announced by the government. The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, in an affidavit filed in the Bombay High Court in response to a petition seeking that sanitary products be declared an essential commodity, said such a decision could only be taken after due process of assessing the demand and supply gap. Disposable pads were added to