Swachh Bharat campaign: Women manual scavengers in Gujarat put to work to "clean up" open defecation

By A Representative
The attached photographs, forwarded by activist of the Dalit rights NGO Navsarjan Trust Natubhai Parmar to Counterview, show that manual scavenging in Wadhwan municipality of Surendranagar district, Gujarat, continues, despite the authorities’ promise last month that the despicable practice would end. The photographs were taken on October 2, 2014, Gandhi Jayanti Day, during Swachh Bharat, the all-India campaign launched Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Parmar said, the women were asked to “manually clean up human excreta” during the campaign. Last month, they protested and went on hunger strike against manual scavenging, and a compromise was struck following intervention by by the district collector, Surendranagar.

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Ex-bureaucrats flag tribal rights concerns in Odisha, seek release of arrested leaders

By A Representative A group of former civil servants, organised as the Constitutional Conduct Group, has issued an open letter to the Government of India expressing concern over the erosion of rights of Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers in Odisha. The group, which describes itself as having no political affiliation, said Odisha has the fourth largest forest cover in India and the third largest Scheduled Tribe population, and alleged that large tracts of tribal-inhabited forests are being surrendered to mining and industrial projects, reducing both the forests and the communities dependent on them to distress.

Swami Vivekananda's views on caste and sexuality were 'painfully' regressive

By Bhaskar Sur* Swami Vivekananda now belongs more to the modern Hindu mythology than reality. It makes a daunting job to discover the real human being who knew unemployment, humiliation of losing a teaching job for 'incompetence', longed in vain for the bliss of a happy conjugal life only to suffer the consequent frustration.

The silent epidemic: What numbers tell us about India's youth mental health crisis

By Jyotiradiya Singh* Every year, the National Crime Records Bureau publishes a report that most people never read. It is called Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India, and buried inside its tables and percentages is one of the clearest pictures we have of what young India is going through right now. The numbers are not abstract. Each one is a person, a family, a room that went quiet.

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