A Dalit household during Bihar floods of 2007 In a fresh move that will have a major impact on the way international donors support NGOs in countries like India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the European Union (EU) has suggested that funding agencies should be sensitive to caste-based discrimination issues while disbursing humanitarian aid. A new EU-sponsored report, “Equality in Aid: Addressing Caste Discrimination in Humanitarian Response”, authored by Katherine Nightingale, has advised “international donors” that they should “ensure accountability” of NGOs in addressing “caste-based discrimination in all the programmes they fund, with a particular emphasis on supporting measures to address caste-based discrimination.”

 A Gujarat government website has said that the state has witnessed “considerable degradation of the mangroves”, and big dams in the upstream are one of the major reasons behind this. The  website , owned by the state forest department’s Integrated Coastal Zone Management Project, being implemented by the Gujarat Ecology Commission (GEC), has explained that “reduction in natural regeneration and death of the rich mangroves” has taken place “because of decreased influx of fresh water into the mangrove areas due to construction of dams, both small and big, in upstream areas.”

  Protest against the construction of the Garudeshwar weir across Narmada river, about 12 kilometres downstream of the Narmada dam, took a new turn on the Republic Day when senior activists of the environmental group Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, Vadodara, and women’s NGO Sahiyar succeeded in convincing the affected villagers about the need to intervene and stop the work which has begun. The result was, following a village-to-village campaign on January 26, on January 27 a team of women from several villages reached Narmada river along the Garudeshwar village and succeeded in ensuring a stop on the ongoing work.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is learnt to have decided to investigate its own "policy violations" while financing a 4000 MW mega power plant at Mundra, Gujarat. It is learnt, the Board of Directors of ADB has  approved the recommendation  of its accountability mechanism, the Compliance Review Panel (CRP), for full investigation, as published in its  Eligibility Report .

Under threat: Lush green fields A fact-finding team set up by the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) on the proposed capital region of Andhra Pradesh has concluded that “there is no rationale for acquiring land to the extent of land 52,000 to 1 lakh acres, as per various pronouncements, from an area which has “diverse and prosperous agriculture”. Pointing out that “a very disturbing game of real estate speculation and land sale has been unleashed”, Contending that this "defies all imagination”, the team said, in the first phase, only 9000 acres were acquired for Chandigarh, and another 6000 acres were acquired for second phase.

There is flutter among farmers of the Dholera special investment region (SIR). Farmers across 22 villages, with a rural populace of around 60,000 in the south of Ahmedabad, have been served notices citing the Gujarat SIR Act, 2009, depriving them of 50 per cent of their land they have been owning it for generations. Ishwarbhai Bhavabhai, who owns 22,663 sq metres of land in Ambli village in Dhandhuka taluka, has been told he has been allocated a different piece of land instead of the one he owns which will be 11,331 sq metres. Bhivabhai Bhawabhai of the same village, who owns 26,912 sq metres of land, has been told he has been similarly allocated 13,456 sq metres of land.

 Why is Gujarat so “backward” in education? Blame it on government schools, and promote private schools. This is the new mission sought to be put forward by one of the most high profile education advocacy groups, Pratham, which has stolen the limelight all over India for its work with policy makers for the last about eight years. This, apparently, is the only reason why, it indicates (but does not say so directly referring to the state), that Gujarat’s educational standards are so poor. And, it seems to believe, it is not government schools which can come to the children’s rescue but only a rigorous emphasis on private schools.

Every year, the Gujarat government celebrates two festivals to improve the quality of education – Kanya Kelavni and Gunotsav. The latest Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER), released by top NGO Pratham, suggests that its state-sponsored drives on education have failed to make any impact on school children.  Gujarat’s much tom-tommed girl child enrolment drive, nick-named as Kanya Kelavni, appears to have gone down the drain, and there appears very little for the state government to cheer over its campaign, which began in 2004 as Mahotsav or festival, if the latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), 2013, released by well-known advocacy group, Pratham, is any indication. The report not only suggests that as many as three per cent of the state’s children in the age-group 6-14 are “out of school” – a criterion worked out in order to combine the children who are school dropouts and those who were never enrolled in schools. It also suggests that the three per cent “out of sc...

Gujarat industry’s net value added (NVA), which is calculated by deducting all the depreciation charges – including consumption of fixed capital such as on raw materials, power and other inputs – has suddenly gone into the minus, surprising many an economist. The latest Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) data, put out in the first week of this month, suggest that NVA, which economists consider as “indicating the actual investment potential of a sector of economy”, has gone into the negative for two consecutive years continuously. It was minus (--) 0.64 per cent in 2010-11 and, again, minus (--) 1.72 per cent in 2011-12. The ASI is the principal source of data on various aspects of registered industrial establishments. They are part of the annual exercise by the Government of India’s Central Statistics Office’s industrial statistics wing.

Two environmental groups, Paryavaran Mitra and Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (PSS), have written separate letters to the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) and the Union environment and forests secretary, respectively, saying that the environmental public hearing (EPH) held for the proposed Dholera special investment region (SIR) at Dholera on January 3, 2014, should be declared null and void, as it violated the Environmental Impact Assessment notification of 2006. The SIR is proposed as a modern industrial township on about 900 sq km land in the south of Ahmedabad city, next to the Gulf of Khambhat.

  In a fresh incident of forced migration, Dalit families of Bhodadhar village of Ranavav taluka, Porbandar district, were coerced to leave their place of living, following upper caste persons destroying their houses. Bringing the incident to the notice of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, who is also chairman of the SC-ST monitoring committee of the state government, senior activist of the Navsarjan Trust, Kantilal Parmar, has alleged the house were destroyed with the “malicious intention to force the Dalits out of the village.” He added, “The houses were destroyed with by using JCB machines, and the reason was -- the Dalits had refused to take back their police complaint under the anti-atrocities law.”

Failure to get forest and environmental clearance for laying down Rs 826 crore submarine pipeline to tap the gas found off Andhra Pradesh coast has cost former bluechip public sector undertaking (PSU), Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC), dear. Latest information available from an internal note has suggested that the GSPC will have to shell out a total of around another US dollars 123.66 ,million, or Rs 760 crore, as “standby” or “idle” charges to Punj Lloyd Ltd (PLL), the top multinational contractors who were hired in an international bid, to lay down the submarine pipeline in 2011.

That Gujarat has failed to govern well in improving its health indicators was once again established by the latest data on maternal mortality ratio (MMR), released by the Office of the Registrar General of India. Latest data released by the Office of the Registrar General of India – which is responsible for collecting, collating and releasing census figures for the country as a whole – have revealed that Gujarat has once again failed to perform as well as majority of Indian states in reducing maternal mortality ratio (MMR). MMR, according to a presentation made by the Office of the Registrar General, refers to “the number of women who die as a result of complications of pregnancy or childbearing in a given year per 1,00,000 live births.” While at 122 MMR per one lakh live child births is better than all states but five – except Kerala (66), Maharashtra (87), Tamil Nadu (90), Andhra Pradesh (110) and West Bengal (117) – the rate of reduction in MMR should be a matter a major concern for...

Former director general of police (DGP) of Gujarat, PGJ Nampoothari, better known as human rights champion, has stirred the hornet’s nest by sounding a different chord with the civil society by declaring that “there is no need” for a separate anti-communal violence Bill, which the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has been contemplating since 2004, and whose draft was made public for discussion in 2011. Known as the Prevention of Communal Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, Nampoothiri believes that, instead of introducing the Bill, all that one needs to do is to “make government officials in charge to be made criminally responsible for failure to control riots.”

Former Gujarat DGP PGJ Nampoothari, who was emissary of the National Human Rights Commission during the Gujarat riots, monitoring the aftermath of the tragedy which befell the state in 2002, says that there’s nothing to suggest that the state administration acted in an impartial way during the riots. He is a retired top cop, who is better known as a human rights activist. Indeed, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi wasn’t quite off the mark when he privately remarked with a sense of prerplexity about him to a senior IPS officer, “Who doesn’t know PGJ Nampoothiri?” Ex-director general of police (DGP) of Gujarat, who first attracted attention during his intensive investigations as CBI officer into the Harshad Mehta security scam in the early 1990s, Nampoothiri shot into fame as special rapporteur of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) following the Gujarat riots. Between 2002 and 2007, Nampoothiri monitored and reported to the NHRC the manner in which the Gujarat riots were bein...

The World Bank has advised the Gujarat government to begin raising resources for building urban infrastructure in major cities by selling off public land to private developers. In a recent policy research study, “Inventory of Public Land in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India”, it has said in Ahmedabad alone huge financial resources “could be generated by monetizing public land” to the tune of Rs 54,000 crore which implies per capita availability of fiscal resources amounting to Rs 97,000. This is double the amount estimated by the state government’s High Powered Expert Committee (HPEC) at 2009-10 prices – Rs 43,386 “for the entire range of physical urban infrastructure for the next twenty years”.