Latest information, available from authoritative sources, has suggested that Gujarat's growth rate at constant prices (arrived at reducing inflation) for 2012-13 – for which the figures have still not been officially released – is down to seven per cent. Well-informed official sources said, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, disturbed by the figure, has held as many as four meetings to “dress up” and finalize the gross state domestic product (GSDP) figure for the year 2012-13. “So far he has not been satisfied with the numbers generated by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics and wants better numbers from them”, said an insider, adding, this is “notwithstanding the economic gloom in general and the poor agricultural scenario brought about by the first serious monsoon failure of his regime.”

A well-attended seminar “India’s descent into fascism: How can we stop it?” saw two senior scholars, Anil Choudhury of the Indian Social Action Forum, Delhi, and Prof Ghanshyam Shah, an eminent Gujarat-based social scientist, presenting diametrically opposite view on the reasons behind possibilities of India slipping under a fascist rule. While both agreed that things had become increasingly difficult for working classes across India to fight for their rights, and this was a clear sign of how the danger of a fascist rule might take over in the country, Choudhury believed that the race to push India to eight per cent rate of growth is forcing the movement towards fascism.

Eight years ago, addressing a gathering of state forest officials at the sprawling campus of the Gujarat Forestry Research and Training Complex in the state capital, Gandhinagar, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi seemed a little unsettled. A few mediapersons too were present, and I happened to be one of them. On April 28, 2005, Modi was confronted with this ticklish query: Will Gir no longer be the only habitat of the Asiatic lion, often addressed as the “Pride of Gujarat”? Announcing that the Asiatic lion's population had risen to 359, a rise of 32 in five years, Modi seemed to feel it was enough to seek publicity on how animal conservation under him had taken new strides – at a time when he had already invited enough ire for failing to conserve the human during the Gujarat riots. Puzzled by the query, he looked around, but no official dared tell him the truth. Refusing to take a stand on the issue (the Gujarat government for several years had been fighting against the “expert”...

Forced migration in Banaskantha  In a strange explanation, the Gujarat government has said that providing information under the Right to Information (RTI) Act on prevalence of untouchability in the state will lead to “a sharp rise in incidence of enmity in the rural areas of Gujarat.” The explanation comes in reply to an RTI application, filed by top NGO Navsarjan Trust's senior activist Kirit Rathod, who had wanted to know details of a report, titled “Understanding Untouchability”, prepared by the Centre for Environment and Town Planning (CEPT) University, commissioned by the Gujarat government on October 22, 2010.

  Kamal Nayan Kabra At a time when the so-called Gujarat model is being touted as the sole panacea for India’s economic ills, a recent book by Kamal Nayan Kabra, Malcolm S. Adisheshiah chair professor, economics of development and decentralized planning, Institute of Social Sciences (ISS), New Delhi, has sharply argued against this type of “growth orthodoxy” which propagates that rate of growth of gross national product (GNP), as determined by the market forces, is the sole criterion of development. Such a GNP-centric model, he says in his book, “Appropriate Development: People First”, published by ISS, is based on the assumption of “trickle-down processes” which could be achieved by “increased public revenue as a fallout of higher GNP”, which would help run “state-led anti-poverty programmes.”

Sabarmati in the downstream, near Vautha Latest study carried out by five experts -- P Amerasinghe, RM Bhardwaj, C Scott, K Jella and F Marshall -- “Urban Wastewater and Agricultural Reuse Challenges in India”, for the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Colombo, has identified Gujarat as one of the three states which has “some of the most polluted rivers”, adding crops irrigated with wastewaters discharged into Sabarmati in the downstream have adversely affected crop quality along the river.

Gool Lodge By Our Representative In a move without any precedence in India, Ahmedabad has hosted a Museum of Conflicts, Conflictorium. Opened on April 14, three voluntary organizations, working on human rights issues, Center for Social Justice, Janvikas and Navsarjan, have come together to launch it in Gool Lodge, Mirzapur. Inspired by top Turkish Nobel laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk, who faced persecution at the hands of right-wing nationalists, Conflictorium seeks in some way to follow Museum of Innocence, established by him in Istanbul in 2012, where a collection evocative of everyday life and culture of Istanbul during the period of his novel “Museum of Innocence” (1970s) has been displayed.

 Finally, a unique event, organized by Gujarat’s human rights organizations, meant to make people understand that BR Ambedkar is not just a Dalit icon but one who stood for equality of all who had much in common with Mahatma Gandhi, came to its conclusion on April 13, on the eve of his birth anniversary. A Shobhayatra was taken out, starting at Anand Ashram, Sarkhej, Ahmedabad, at 10 in the morning. Taken out in the form of a procession, it  passed through Sonal Cinema Char Rasta, Boot Bhavani Temple, Vejalpur, Jivraj Park, APMC Char Rasta, Mahalaxmi Char Rasta, National Institute of Design, and will culminate at Sanskar Kendra, Paldi in the afternoon.

A polyacrylate victim In a sharp demand, the People’s Research and Training Centre (PTRC), the Vadodara-based NGO working on occupational health issues, wants the Government of India and Government of Gujarat to come up with an amendment in schedule III of the Employees’ Compensation Act, in order to include polyacrylate and musculoskeletal in the list of occupational diseases. In separate letters to the Gujarat labour minister and director-general, ESI Corporation, Jagdish Patel, who heads PTRC, has said that while polyacrylate is a serious lung disease rampant among Gujarat’s pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry, musculoskeletal is a debilitating injury to millions of workers in a wide cross-section of occupations, against which workers of a state-based car manufacturing company represented before the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).

Sanghamitra Acharya Even as a recent, prepared jointly by the US-based East-West Management Institute, and Navsarjan Trust, a human rights NGO, has found that nearly 20 per cent of Dalit children aged 2-5 in rural Gujarat “miss” the anti-polio dose, thus failing to be immunized, a top study sponsored by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), based on on-the-spot inquiry, has found that untouchability is the most important factor in failure in health delivery to Gujarat’s (and Rajasthan’s) Dalit children. Based on primary data and personal interviews, the study, done a couple of years ago, has surprisingly gone largely unnoticed.

A fresh study sponsored by US-based organization, East-West Management Institute (EWMI), in alliance with Gujarat’s human rights NGO, Navsarjan Trust, has found “dramatic differences in the delivery of immunization services between Dalits and non-Dalits.” Carried out among 2,308 children ages 5 and under from 77 villages in eight Gujarat districts in consultation with Dr Dileep Mavalankar of the Public Health Foundation of India, and Dr Ankur Sarin of the Public Systems Group, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, the survey says that 20.4 per cent of Dalit children, age 2-5 years, were unvaccinated for the poliovirus in Gujarat’s rural areas, and this rate was “more than twice as high as non-Dalits in comparable geographic regions.”

A recent report by two civil rights groups, Samata and Mines, Minerals and People (MM&P), has expressed serious concern over possibilities of sharp rise in mining in eco-sensitive zones of Gujarat, expeciall because lately construction activities are all set to see a drastic upsurge in the Petroleum, Chemical and Petrochemical Investment Region and other special investment regions of the state. The report, titled “Sharing Summary of Experiences in Mining Regions of India with Legislators, Decision Makers and Civil Society”, expresses the fear that “the demand for construction materials is going to rise, which is seeing large scale illegal mining in rivers as well as undermining common property resources to set up industrial units.”

Maganbhai In a recent blog, Umesh Solanki, documentary maker and writer, has highlighted little-known fact about a community in Gujarat which is treated as untouchable but is deprived of being treated on par with other sections of Dalits. In his  report , “Untouchable but not Dalit”, Solanki gives the instance of Mangabhai Parmar from Lathi in Amreli district, hardworking man, to prove his point. Maganbhai is one of the 10,580 persons who belong to a very small community called Nat, a Nomadic tribe. To him “sweat is natural to the body, and this nature has derived from the social tradition, or let me say, caste system”, underlies Solanki.

Senior activists of several advocacy groups stormed into the civil society consultation, being held to “review” and “update” the World Bank's environmental and social safeguard policies organized by the World Bank at India Habitat Centre in New Delhi.

Shalini Randeria A top Geneva-based researcher has sharply contested the application of international norms of biodiversity conservation on the Gir forest, which consider the establishment of uninhabited ‘protected areas’ as an effective way to protect nature. Writing in “Asia and Europe Bulletin” of the University of Zurich, Prof Shalini Randeria, who currently chairs the anthropology and sociology department at the prestigious Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, says, “The ideology and practices of new regimes of environmental governance in Gir forest” have merely continued the (post)colonial practice of “displacement, dispossession and the curtailment of the rights of forest-dwelling communities.”

Urvish Kothari It was August 20, 2009 forenoon. I barged into the small cabin of a senior home department babu, an IAS bureaucrat who is currently working in the general administration department of the Narendra Modi administration, seeking to humbly “advise” the government on IAS postings. I found him “busier than he was”, to quote from one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s characterizations. The babu was too engrossed in scanning through BJP leader Jaswant Singh’s book, “Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence”, banned by the Gujarat government a day earlier for allegedly casting aspersions on Sardar Patel’s supposed role in partitioning India.  “I am too busy. I have been given the task of finding out the objectionable references which are critical of Sardar Patel”, the official said, frantically looking into the index pages on the backside of the hard cover book. Why now? I wondered. The book had already been banned! “So was the book banned without reading it? And when did you receive the...