'Make Every Mom Who Faces Childbirth Count'

A Clothing Accessory For Women Cotton Pickers

Jess's Descent To Somewhere Else

A Moving, Singing Revolution: The Bauls Of Bengal

Kandhamal's Mothers Live With The Memories of Violence

From Asian Teens, With Love: Healthy Meals

Give Her A Good Story, She'll Make A Great Film

In Pakistan's Hour Of Need, GenNext Responds

Maximum City, Minimum Opportunities: How Mumbai's Unorganised Women Workers Cope

Rasoolpur's Gang of Girls Take Charge

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United States
'Make Every Mom Who Faces Childbirth Count'
Pamela Philipose

She calls herself a "public educator", and for good reason. Jill Sheffield, 61, the founder-president of the New York-based non-profit, 'Women Deliver', has been tirelessly campaigning to put maternal mortality on the global agenda. For her, battling maternal mortality is about a very simple idea: Protecting women's right to live. Recently in New Delhi, Sheffield spoke to Pamela Philipose on the need to educate people about maternal mortality, its effect on women's work and the role that technology can play to help reduce the alarming MMR levels across the world.

'The situation is Africa is really bad: One woman in every six is destined to die. In India, the rate is much better, but the numbers are huge... There is one maternal death every seven minutes in India.'

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India
A Clothing Accessory For Women Cotton Pickers
Nitin Jugran Bahuguna

Body aches, bleeding hands and rashes were part of life for Jankabai Muley, a cotton picker of Kachhighati village in Maharashtra's Aurangabad district, all thanks to picking cotton day-in-and-day-out on her farm. When she was presented with a special cotton-picking coat being distributed to women farmers in the region by the World Wide Fund for Nature-India, as a means of alleviating their hardships on the field, Jankabai was sceptical. She didn't like the white garment that reminded her of a shroud, nor was she enamoured of the sac attached to it, which she doubted would be able to hold as much cotton as the 'pallav' of her sari. But just a day of using the new garment and she knew she was wrong. Today, the cotton coat is the reason Jankabai and many other women pickers here are a healthier and happier lot.

"The coat actually covers and protects my whole body! And my neck and back pains have also miraculously disappeared with the continued use of this new garment."

[Photographs Available]

New Zealand
Jess's Descent To Somewhere Else
Sarojini Vittachi

She sat in the garden in her wheelchair reading a detective story. I went out to join her in the March autumn sun, and said, "Jess, what's the book about?" "I just can't figure it out," she said and continued reading. The next day a smiling lady came to the door. "I've brought some things for Promilla (Jess) and Pixie (her husband)," she said. I whispered to Jess, "Who is she?" She replied, "I've never seen her before." When Jess - Jessie Promilla Iyengar - was young she excelled in studies, won medals at medical college and was the youngest Professor of Pathology in Mumbai. But the brilliant New Zealand-based doctor passed away after a tough battle with Alzheimer's Disease. Her sister recalls Jess's struggle with the illness even as her family and friends rallied around her. A special first-person account to mark World Alzheimer's Day.

Her thoughts slipped away before she could articulate them into words like "Turn on the electric blanket" or "Give me water".

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India
A Moving, Singing Revolution: The Bauls Of Bengal
Ajitha Menon

With a song on her lips and the desire for a social revolution in her heart, Radha Rani 'Bairagi', 39, a fifth generation 'Baul', roams the towns and villages of Bengal. A unique cult of free-thinkers, Bauls are wandering poets who are part of the vanguard in the struggle for social change. So if her forefathers sang of freedom fighters laughingly embracing the noose for their motherland, today Radha Rani, and 50-odd women like her, sing of the dangers of the communal divide, environment issues like how excessive fishing destroys the ecological balance, the importance of educating every child, and even the need for polio vaccinations and AIDS prevention.

Radha Rani and her partner Rabi Das will sing in France about fishing nets and fish. "It's a song we sang in Goa about the need for fishing cautiously so as to preserve the delicate ecological balance."

[Photographs Available]

India
Kandhamal's Mothers Live With The Memories of Violence
Aditi Bhaduri

Kanak Rekha Nayak hid in the forest with her two girls as rioters murdered her husband on the outskirts of their village Budedipada-Madinaju in Orissa's Kandhamal district. Priyatama Nayak, a mother of four, saw her husband being burnt alive before her eyes, even as her home was being looted. Runima Digal, from Mallikapada, is struggling to get justice for her slain husband. Kanak, Priyatama and Runima are all women who had personally experienced the devastating violence that had rocked Kandhamal in 2008. Experts have since gone into long explanations of the causes of the violence - inter-tribal rivalry; changes in demographic composition because of mass conversions, and so on. But while such analyses are needed to usher in sustainable peace in the region, they cannot help Kandhamal's mothers, wives and daughters who continue to live with the searing memories of violence.

What did Kanak expect from the tribunal? With an empty voice she said that she actually expected nothing. She had come there because she wanted others - as many people as possible - to know what had taken place in Kandhamal.

[Photographs Available]