Counterview

By Sheshu Babu*
In analyzing economic data, various sectors like industry, agriculture, services, etc. are taken into account. But domestic work done by women is rarely 'measured' by analysts. A woman getting up early to make ready food for working husbands is very valuable but it does not figure in the estimates relating to economic figures.

By Our Representative
A just-released report, “The Hidden Cost of Hydropower” by a Himachal Pradesh-based civil rights group, Himadhara, has warned that the market for hydropower has been “dwindling over the last few years”, as evident from "falling revenues from the hydropower sector" in the state, where “the installed capacity has risen from around 6000 MW to 10,547 MW in the last ten years”, but “the annual revenue from the sector which was around Rs 1300 crores a decade ago is at around Rs 908 crores in the last financial year.”

By Ajit Sahi*
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee is headed towards failure in her pitched battle against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There is no stopping Modi’s aggressive, no-holds-barred political play. And Mamata has neither a strategy nor any tactics to fend it off.

Counterview Desk
The Amnesty International India’s controversial report “Tyranny of a ‘Lawless Law’: Detention without Charge or Trial Under the J&K Public Safety Act”, released after the top international NGO was refused permission to hold a media conference in Srinagar, hasn’t just confined itself to analyzing 210 case studies, reportedly about the plight of the people who had been detained under  PSA between 2012 and 2018. It also documents how the Act is "misused" to detain minors.

By RK Misra*
Gujarat spent Rs 3,000 crore building the Statue of Unity, the tallest statue in the world, but in Surat 22 students died on May 24 because the fire brigade did not have a ladder to reach the fourth floor of a building in flames. Considered the commercial capital of Gujarat, Surat is the eighth largest city of India. There are almost 14,000 people per km here and the skyline is dotted with multi-storeyed buildings.

Counterview Desk 
Amnesty International India, which was not allowed to release of its report “Tyranny of a ‘lawless law’: Detention without charge or trial under the J&K Public Safety Act”, has made it public, pointing towards how the Act empowers authorities to arrest a person without any trial for six months, causing havoc among the people of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).

Counterview Desk
SP Udayakumar, well-known anti-nuclear campaigner, in a letter to the President of India has said that he and his colleagues have been branded as “urban-Naxals, Maoists, anti-Indians, seditious, separatists, foreign stooges and so forth”, even though they have advocated non-violent struggle.

Counterview Desk
Gauhar Raza, scientist, documentary film maker and poet; senior human rights activist Shabnam Hashmi of the Act Now for Harmony and Democracy (ANHAD); military veteran Major Priyadarshi Chowdhury (retd); and Sucheta De and Sandeep Saurav of the All India Students' Association (AISA), have asked “individuals, organisations and people's movements” to send their endorsement to an appeal they have prepared on Electronic Voting Machine (EVM).

Counterview Desk
Even is refusing to reply point by point issues raised by Dr Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic adviser, Government of India (GoI), regarding how GoI has been ever since 2011  overestimating India’s GDP growth by a whopping 2.5%, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) has asserted that the methodology followed by him based on indicators like electricity consumption, two-wheeler sales, commercial vehicle sales, etc. and using an econometric model to arrive at the conclusion is “simplistic.”