New Delhi: "Don't punish my child, punish me; don't drag him, drag me," a wailing India-born pharmaceutical scientist from the US pleaded as heavily armed CBI sleuths pushed his seven-year-old son inside a court room of the Supreme Court. The sleuths had tracked down the son and his mother to Chennai last week.

Dr V Ravi Chandran has been in India for the past two years, looking for his US-born son Aditya. Chandran's estranged wife Vijayshree Voora moved Aditya to India against an American family court order. The court had also allowed the child's father his joint custody.

Your identity follows a standard format in India: son or daughter of Mr X. That is how you know one Sunita or Ram is different from another. But what if you don't want to put in your father's name or be identified solely by your family name? Should you be denied all official documents? Shouldn't your mother's name be sufficient to establish your identity?

Unfortunately, that is not the case, as illustrated by the recent case of a 19-year-old Mumbai girl, who was denied a passport because she refused to write her biological father's name on the application form. The man had not communicated with his daughter since the day she was born and the girl thought it justified to leave his name out. Read More Even though her mother raised her and the girl still lives with her, the courts have said she can be granted a passport if she lists her foster father as her father and fills in the application form accordingly.

Mothers in India clearly have a long way to go to achieve legal gender equality.

The children of mothers who return to work full time in the years before they start school have slower emotional development and score less well in reading and maths tests, according to a study published today by the Institute for Social and Economic Research.

The disadvantage starts in primary school and persists into early adulthood, with lower educational attainment, higher unemployment and greater likelihood of childbearing early in life.

An early return to work by the mother reduces the child's chances of progressing to A-level from 60% to 50%. The employment patterns of the father have little effect, said the study by John Ermisch and Marco Francesconi, professors at Essex University.

The Supreme Court has given the Karnataka police “a last chance” to trace the six-and-a-halfyear-old son of Dr V.Ravinchandra, a scientist from the US, who has alleged that his ex-wife has kidnapped their son.

Dr Ravichandra held a press conference in the city in February alleging that his ex-wife Vijayashree Voora had vanished two years after abducting their son Aditya. The couple divorced in the US in 2005 and got equal custody of their son. Dr Ravinchandra, who has since become a member of Child Rights Initiative Shared Parenting, claims that his wife is mentally unstable. He has also managed to get an ex-parte order from a court in the US giving him sole custody of Aditya. “Every time I come from the US and get a clue about where she is, she escapes, even as I rush to the spot,” he said at the press conference.

SURAT: A woman fighting a court battle to gain her son's custody assaulted her estranged husband near additional sessions court here on Monday.

Sources at the court and Umra police station said that Sunita alias Sangeeta Das married Sirajuddin Taj Mohammad of Delhi and converted to Islam, changing her name to Ayesha. After the birth of her son Suhail and daughter Sabah, the couple got separated few years ago.

Sangita, who currently lives at Parth Complex near China Gate in New City Light area with her daughter, moved court demanding a search warrant for Sirajuddin. The plea alleged that Sirajuddin abducted her son and so she wanted her son's custody.