Here’s your wrap of news for the week gone by: India has slipped 28 places to rank 140th among 156 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021, becoming the third-worst performer in South Asia. The report benchmarks the evolution of gender-based gaps in four areas: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. The report says most of the decline in India has occurred on the political empowerment subindex. In South Asia, only Pakistan and Afghanistan ranked below India. A 15-year-old dalit girl of a village under Bulhowal police station committed suicide after she was allegedly raped by two men of the same village on Sunday.The First-Information Report (FIR) says that the girl had gone out in the morning to see her friend. On the way, two men Lovepreet Singh and Gurpreet Singh forcibly took her to a tubewell, where she was gang raped. The victim’s family alleged that the accused poisoned her, before dropped her on the outskirts of the village. Preliminary police investigation has, however, revealed that the girl had returned home in about two hours, but she consumed poison on Sunday late evening. Myanmar on Thursday refused to accept a 14-year-old Rohingya girl who had arrived in India nearly two years ago under unclear circumstances. A team of Assam Police from Cachar district accompanied her to the Indo-Myanmar border in Manipur’s Moreh where she was supposed to be handed over. But the immigration department of the neighbouring country refused to open the gate saying that the situation is not appropriate for any deportation currently. An immigration official from India assured that the girl will be sent back to Silchar for now. He said, “We all know that the situation in Myanmar is not peaceful and it is not safe to send this minor girl now. But there are some procedures in these cases, and we have to follow them.” A study led by professors of Punjab Agriculture University (PAU), Ludhiana, has shed light on the plight of women working as farm labourers in the state. It states that the suicide rate among women farm labourers is 1.5 times higher than among women farmers. As per the study, 12.43 per cent of the farm labourers dying by suicide in the state are women, and this suicide rate was high against that of women farmers, which was recorded at 8.2 per cent. The study further says that the children of 12 per cent of victims’ families left school due to the deplorable conditions after the suicide. The US Senate took the historic step Wednesday of confirming pediatrician Rachel Levine as President Joe Biden's assistant secretary of health, making her the highest-ranking transgender official to serve in the federal government. Levine was leading the Pennsylvania Department of Health when Biden tapped her for the national post in January, in a notable first for the LGBTQ community. The pick was also a contrast to policies of previous president Donald Trump that were seen as discriminatory. -------------------------------------------------------- Follow Feminism In India: Website: https://www.feminisminindia.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/feminisminindia Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/feminisminindia Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/feminismini... Telegram: https://t.me/feminisminindia Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/cjuLbv
