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Challenges Remain in the Prevention of Sexual Violence in India

The Mathura rape case of 1972, where a young tribal girl was raped by two uniformed police officials in Maharashtra, was a watershed moment in India’s rape laws that shook the country and initiated the first changes in India’s archaic rape laws.  Forty years later, the brutal Nirbhaya case of 2012 jolted the nation out of its stupor.  The case led to reforms in the rape laws in the country, redefined rape, brought in stringent punishment and introduced death penalties for repeat rape offenders. Yet on the ground, little seems to have changed for the girls and women in India. The latest crime figures against women tell a different story. There has been a 15% increase in cases of crime against women in 2021 from the previous year, according to the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data released in August 2022.

The Collapse of SVB: The Story of Systematic and Unsystematic Risk

And the story goes on like this. This bank, named Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), lent money to the tech industries and start-ups, primarily in the tech domain. On 10th March 2023, the news broke that this bank collapsed and did not have enough funds to pay back to its depositors. SVB was the biggest US lender to fail since the 2008 global financial crisis.

The SVB Downfall: a Macroeconomic Phenomenon

The real world has a way of confounding textbook economics. Macroeconomics, the branch that deals with the big things like growth, inflation and interest rates, seems broken when used to implement policy. In medicine, a drug is not approved for use if it has potentially serious side-effects. Or, if it's approved, it is administered with care, in the right doses. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the pressure on other US banks suggests that economists still don't quite appreciate the side-effects of their actions.

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