The temple priest with Dalit activists Under the “Gujarat model” of development, there is reason why Dalits being allowed entry into a public temple in a village dominated by high caste persons makes news. This is what happened in Kherpur village, barely 30 kiometres from the Gujarat capital, Gandhinagar. A few days ago, in May second week, Dalits, with 20 households in Kherpur in Kadi taluka of Mehsana district of North Gujarat, were finally allowed to enter into the local temple and pray, without any hindrance. It is the same village which saw high caste persons fatally attacking Dalit men, women and children as a “punishment” for forcing their way into the temple in 2008.

Rajindar Sachar Justice (retired) Rajindar Sachar, who headed high-powered committee, which came up with a much-debated report on the social, economic and educational status of Muslims in India in 2006, has declared that the BJP is living in great delusion that Article 370 of the Constitution of India, which provides autonomous status to Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) , can be abrogated.  In a commentary circulated on the social media by well-known social activist Teesta Setelvad, fighting a legal battle against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s involvement in the 2002 Gujarat riots, Sachar said, J&K became part of India on October 27, 1947 only because of the Instrument of Accession, dated October 27, 1947, signed by the Maharaja, allowing the J&K to acceded to the Dominion of India.

Nirma cement plant in Gujarat  Soon after the swearing in of the new Narendra Modi government at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Monday, the website of the Prime Minister's Office was re-launched. The message it sent out, interestingly, has already become controversial, both in Delhi and Gujarat. Launched on the very old address, under a new heading “Quest for Transparency” it says, the PM “firmly believes that transparency and accountability are the two cornerstones of any pro-people government. Transparency and accountability not only connect the people closer to the government but also make then equal and integral part of the decision making process.”

There is a flutter among voluntary organisations in Gujarat, as elsewhere. With the change of guards at the Centre, there is a rising apprehension about what would be the government's new policy towards civil society, in Gujarat as well as in India. Would the NGOs’ space shrink? Would they have to make political compromises with the powers-that-be for the sake of survival? What kind of structural changes they might have to undergo in case they have to survive in the new atmosphere? What would happen to sources of foreign funding, on which many NGOs depend? These are some of the most common questions currently being asked by several leading members of civil society, which have involved themselves in different types of activities, developmental or rights-based, across Gujarat. Informal meetings have been held. Despite their differences in approach, all of them agree: That there is a need to find fresh ways to work in the new situation. Without any doubt, the situation in the country ...

An initial SNAM campaign for communal unity Gujarat's powerful officialdom is learnt to have encouraged Hindu-Muslim divide as a deliberate policy while resettling Ahmedabad’s around 10,000 slum-dwellers, affected by the Sabarmati riverfront project, begun being implemented in 2005 to “beautify” the city. Bringing this to light in her latest research paper, “Municipal Politics, Court Sympathy and Housing Rights: A Post-Mortem of Displacement and Resettlement under the Sabarmati Riverfront Project, Ahmedabad” (May 2014), Renu Desai of the CEPT University has said, the “policy” was instrumental in resettling Hindu and Muslim slum-dwellers in segregated localities, far from the city.

  An Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore survey, in coordination with magicbricks.com, India’s top property portal, has found that Kolkata’s and Ahmedabad’s younger generation is a relatively poor buyer of residential properties as compared to other comparable cities. Seeking to identify Housing Sentiment Index (HSI), the survey has found that Kolkata’s and Ahmedabad’s 25-40 age group form 61 per cent of the housing property purchasters, as against 64 per cent in Mumbai, 67 per cent in Gurgaon, 74 per cent in Hyderabad, 75 per cent in Bangalore and Noida, and 77 per cent in Pune.

The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), Delhi-based advocacy group, has insisted that one of the first steps that the new Government of India must take is to build confidence among the whistle blowers, a much-threatened community, by implementing the Whistle Blowers’ Protection (WBP) Act, 2011. The law provides for an institutionalised mechanism to protect, and thus encourage, those who disclose information on corrupt practices or abuse of power by government officials, using the right to information (RTI). The Act passed in Lok Sabha in 2011, and after a lapse of two years, it was passed in the Rajya Sabha in February 2014, ahead of announcement of the Lok Sabha polls. President Pranab Mukherjee gave assent to it on May 14. CHRI data, reported up to December 2013, show that Maharashtra and Gujarat have see maximum attacks on RTI activists. Maharashtra has seen 53 attacks on RTI activists, including nine cases of murder, over the last eight years, while Gujarat comes second wi...

Taking strong exception to the high-level report by the committee formed by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan to review governance of nationalized banks in India, which recommends that public sector banks should be out of the purview of the Right to Information Act, 2005, a senior activist Venkatesh Nayak has said the committee's attitude towards RTI is “very disturbing” and “problematic”, as there is no evidence to suggest that RTI is in any way being misused against the nationalized banks.

Dr PK Misra Dr PK Misra, principal secretary of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi during the 2002 riots, is learnt to have been told that he should join the new team under Modi’s stewardship immediately after the new BJP-led government takes over in Delhi following the Lok Sabha poll results on May 16. A top Gujarat government bureaucrat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Counterview that Dr Misra has been telling his IAS colleagues in Gandhinagar Sachivalaya that he has been “sounded about this by Modi personally".

Alarm bells have started to ring even before Narendra Modi has taken over as India’s Prime Minister. A high-level report of the committee formed by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan to review governance of boards of banks in India has strongly recommended that public sector banks should be out of the purview of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, considered a powerful tool in the hands of people and activists to seek justice. Already, top Modi supporters have begun saying the right to information is a waste of public money.

  Top UK-based consultants Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu’s Indian professionals’ report, “Survey on Business Regulatory Environment for Manufacturing – State Level Assessment”, prepared for the Planning Commission, may have rated Gujarat as No 2 state – next to Haryana – on important industry-related yardsticks which attract investment (read  HERE ).  However, a study of detailed inter-state comparison of the report suggests that Gujarat ranks 16th among 20 major states in obtaining environmental compliance for establishing enterprises, and 15th in getting environmental compliance to them to kick-start operation.

Dalits with activist Kirit Rathod In yet another glaring instance of social boycott in Gujarat, around 30 Dalits – men, women and children – currently living in makeshift shanties in Gitapur village in Detroj taluka of Ahmedabad district, are being denied all basic facilities, including water, electricity or needs of daily use in the village by members of the dominant caste, Patels. Situated just about 80 km from Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s business capital, Gitapur Dalits are facing the predicament because they allegedly dared demand physical possession of the plots of land they were entitled to for the last over two years now.

Latest calculations have suggested that those who have been citing total debt figures to suggest Gujarat is not the highest indebted state are actually hiding an important fact. While Gujarat’s total debts – or “liabilities” in the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) lexicon – were Rs 1.85 lakh crore as of March 2014, and the states with a higher debts than Gujarat were Andhra Pradesh (Rs 1.94 lakh crore), Maharashtra (Rs 2.94 lakh crore), Uttar Pradesh (Rs 2.85 lakh crore), and West Bengal (Rs 2.45 lakh crore), this hides the crucial factor: Gujarat’s per capita debt is higher than all these “more indebted” states.

A book eulogizing Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s “core governance” was launched in Ahmedabad amidst key speakers, while praising the Modi model, refusing to recall once how the man who ruled the state for the last 13 years has handled Gujarat riots or “fake” encounters. The speakers consisted of right-wing columnist Gunwant Shah, Times of India group’s Navgujarat Samay editor Ajay Umath, and author Uday Mahurkar, editor, India Today, Ahmedabad. They seemed not keen to recall why the riots continued for three long months in 2002, what all Modi did (or did not do) to “stop” them, and how he has confronted – effectively or ineffectively – the post-riots impact on Gujarat society.

  A new study has contradicted the BJP's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s claim that Muslims have voted for him in a very big way in Gujarat. Carried out by Raheel Dhattiwala, who was recently awarded PhD from the University of Oxford on her research on Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat, her fresh “policy paper” for the Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy says, much against Modi’s claims of “over 30 per cent Muslims” having voted for the BJP Gujarat in 2012, an analysis of polling booth data suggest that “the maximum voting for the BJP by Muslims was 10 per cent”.

Shaktisinh Gohil Did senior Gujarat Congress leader Shaktisinh Gohil display his poor understanding of the caste system in Gujarat when he  declared  that Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi does not belong to the other backward class (OBC) but to an upper caste? At least two top senior experts, known for their proficiency in sociology and history of Gujarat, have wondered “how could Gohil go so wrong” on Modi’s caste status. Gohil, who all-India Congress spokesperson, has created a ripple by “disclosing” that Modi included his caste, modh ghanchi, into the OBC list three months after he came to power through a government resolution dated January 1, 2002.

RK Jha, director, GIFT Is the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s top dream project – Gujarat International Finance Tec-city (GIFT) -- all set to be scaled down?  Proposed as India’s premier financial hub for more than Rs 78,000 crore, questions began asked about its viability ever since it was first announced in 2007. If earlier only bureaucrats in the state capital Gandhinagar doubted it would be anything more than a real estate hub, now it transpires that the man who promised to make GIFT a big success has questioned its viability.

The All-India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE), operating under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, in its recent report has suggested that Gujarat’s gross enrollment ratio (GER) in higher education, which was 21.3 per cent of the population in the age group 18-23 in 2010-11, went down to 17.6 per cent a year later – in 2011-12. Worse, Gujarat’s GER ranking fell from ninth among 20 major states in 2010-11 to 13th in 2011-12. The AISHE report also indicates that while Gujarat’s GER performance was above national average (19.4 per cent of the population in the 18-23 age group) in 2010-11, in 2011-12, the GER nationally improved to 20.4 per cent, which pushed Gujarat below the national average. In absolute terms, the AISHE data suggest, in Gujarat, in 2011-12, a total of 12,54,202 students in the age group 18-23 were enrolled in higher education, of which 7,31,241 were boys and 5,22,961 girls. Significantly, this was down from the enrollment in 2010-11, when...

The Gujarat government has said it has “decided” not to pay Rs 5 lakh each as compensation against five confirmed cases of silicosis death, despite a National Human Right Commission (NHRC) direction to the state officialdom to do so. The workers died five years ago. This has been revealed in reply to a query under the right to information (RTI) to the Peoples Training and Research Center (PTRC), made to chief secretary, Government of Gujarat, Varesh Sinha, on April 7, 2014. The PTRC wished to know whether the state government had made up its mind to pay the amount due to the poor tribal families.

Fresh data released by the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD), Government of India, suggest that Gujarat is one of the poorest performers in ensuring the enrollment of children in secondary and higher secondary schools. Found reflected in the report, “Secondary Education in India, Thematic Maps: 2012-13”, published by the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), which operates under the MHRD, the data suggest that out of 20 major states, as many as 13 of them enrolled a higher proportion of students than Gujarat at the higher secondary level. At the secondary level, things are not very different – here, too, as many as 13 major states enrolled higher proportion of students than Gujarat. At the higher secondary level, Gujarat could enroll just 38.04 per cent of children, the data show. This was better than only Odisha, Bihar, Assam, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. The best performer was Himachal Pradesh with a gross enrollment ratio of...

Conviction rate in anti-atrocity cases (%) Well-known Dalit rights activist Manjula Pradeep, releasing fresh data suggesting Gujarat’s failure to take care of the scheduled castes (SCs), has alleged that the “progressive” state is far behind the two “backward” neighbouring states, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, in implementing the anti-atrocities Act. The Act envisages stringent punishment to those involved in acts of oppression against Dalits and tribals. “The conviction rate of those found involved in violating the law is just about 7.8 per cent in Gujarat, as against 29 per cent in Madhya Pradesh and 41 per cent in Rajasthan”, she declared.

The eulogy of “Gujarat model” in the midst of Lok Sabha polls has begun to find pro-Narendra Modi economists to come with new ideas. One of them, Prof R Vaidyanathan of the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B), has gone to the extent of saying that the steps taken by the UPA government by seeking to confer “new rights on the people” through “right to information, right to work (MNREGA), right to food, right to education, and now right to health” are only extensions of “the massively corrupt system refused to die and the Frankenstein state, created over 60 years.”

A top report prepared by well-known consultants, KPMG, employed in the past by the Gujarat government for advising on how to improve the state’s investment climate, has revealed that the state’s investment potential has been dipping over the last five years. In its just-released report, titled “District wise skill gap study for the State of Gujarat (2012-17, 2017-22)”, KPMG, which prides itself for having a network of global professionals offering best of advise on improving investment climate to governments and private parties, has shown, through a chart, that in Gujarat a total of Rs 103,871 crore of investment was made in 2012, which was the lowest since 2008.

UN special rapporteur Manjoo A top United Nations (UN) official has come down heavily on India’s National Commission for Women (NCW), saying that its legal basis “is not in accordance with international standards”, and has suggested that it has been soft in dealing with cases of victims of communal violence in India, Pointing out that “the institution lacks foundational, functional, operational, political and financial independence”, the official, Rashida Manjoo, UN special rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, has said, “The commission is generally unable to adapt to the evolving and transformative demands of the human rights of women.”