Counterview

By Nava Thakuria*  With Nobel peace laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus receiving the Olympic Laurel award at the opening ceremony of 32nd Games of the Olympiad Tokyo 2020, organized under the shadow of Covid-19 pandemic with no audience on the ground, his motherland in South Asia incorporated its name in the history of Olympics.

By Our Representative Odisha civil rights groups have launched a new project, which will cover 8,000 households under of Podia block in Odisha’s Malkangiri district in order to provide essential preventive medicine to the community through the trained village-based Swasthya Sathis (health workers) and fight malnutrition in the district’s rural areas.

By Aaron Gates-Lincoln*  It is no secret that the UK government’s current attitude towards issues in immigration are harsh and punitive based. Recently, Priti Patel has faced much criticism as Home Secretary for implementing a large range of policy that many argue is regressive and unnecessarily ruthless as she attempts to deter migrants from wishing to enter the UK. One method that has faced heavy criticism as of late is that of frequent immigration raids within local communities.

By Rajiv Shah  Will the new report by well-known elite NGO Toxics Link create a ripple in the powerful corridors of Delhi? Titled “Quantitative analysis of microplastics along River Ganga”, forwarded to Counterview, doesn’t just say that Ganga is the second most polluted river in the world, next only to Yangtze (China). It goes ahead to do a comparison of microplastics pollution in three cities shows Varanasi – the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi – is more polluted compared to Kanpur and Haridwar.

By Our Representative Taking serious note of the failure of the Maghalaya government's refusal for a year to ensure distribution of the Rs 52 crore promise by it in March 2020 under the Chief Minister’s Relief Against Wage Loss (CRAWL), intended to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on unorganized sector workers, India's civil rights network National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) has said it supports social activist Angela Rangad who has been on a protest sit-in at the gates of the Secretariat in Shillong on this.

Counterview Desk  Civil rights leader Kirity Roy has strongly objected to the manner in which the Border Security Force (BSF) , the police and the judiciary in West Bengal have treated a 35 years old Bangladeshi woman victim of human trafficking, who was subjected to sexual exploitation for 15 long years, has been declared guilty of violating the Foreigners Act, violating all human rights norms.

Counterview Desk  A report prepared by the Religious Liberty Commission the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI), founded in 1951 as the national alliance of evangelical Christians of the Protestant denomination, in its just-released report, “Hate and Targeted Violence against Christians in India: Half Yearly Report 2021”, has said that an analysis of 145 cases of violence it has documented against Christians, mainly by non-state actors, “stems from an environment of targeted hate.”

By Debarun Dutta*  Nearly two lakh tribal workers migrate every year from districts of Dang and Tapi in Gujarat and Nandurbar and Dhule in Maharashtra to harvest sugarcane in farms of South Gujarat. The workers are deployed by the Sugarcane Cooperative Factories promoted by sugarcane farmers who are a powerful political community. The workers are recruited by middlemen against advances that they have to pay back one and a half times after the six-month work season.

By Our Representative A public hearing, sponsored by the civil rights group National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) to hear the affected citizens of Khorigaon, off Faridabad, Delhi NCR, has seen local people complaining how their houses are being demolished even as the entire area was converted into a prison through heavy police deployment.