Balwant Singh In an order major policy implication, Gujarat's chief information commissioner (CIC) has said that officials of the Gujarat government must respond to a right to information (RTI) query involving “question of life and liberty” within 48 hours, instead of keeping things pending. And, the CIC added, if the entire information is not there, “the available information should be provided within 48 hours” while rest of it could be “furnished expeditiously.”

About 40 victim-survivors from some of the most-affected colonies of Ahmedabad and other towns during the 2002 Gujarat riots – Naroda Patiya, Citizen Nagar, Ekta Nagar, Faizal Park, Visnagar and Gulberg Society – on Saturday raised a strong voice supporting well-known human rights activist Teesta Setalvad, saying the Gujarat government is harassing her because she stood by them during their most critical times, and ensured 126 convictions.

Taking a strange view, a senior researcher of the prestigious Delhi School of Economics, Smriti Sharma, has reached the drastic  conclusion  that crimes against the scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled castes (STs) by the upper castes would go down with the rise in the income levels of the latter. The scholar reaches her controversial conclusion on the basis the analysis of the officially-available data of 2000s.

  Latest budget papers, just released by the Gujarat government in the state assembly, have revealed that, much against the  claims  of “double digit rate of growth”, Gujarat's gross state domestic product (GSDP) at constant prices (calculated by deducting inflation) rose by 8.76 per cent in the year financial year 2013-14, and is unlikely cross the 7 per cent mark in 2014-15. At current prices (without deducting inflation), they suggest, state's growth rate is one of the poorest in India, putting a question mark of Gujarat being India's growth engine.

  A new research work by a Gujarat Vidyapeeth scholar, Dr Damini Shah, has said that, thanks to ghettoisation of Muslims following the 2002 Gujarat riots, there has been shocking rise in religious obscurantism in the Muslim colonies, most of which were set up by Islamic non-government organizations in order to provide security to the riot victims.

Well-known historian Romila Thapar has said that the function of a public intellectual is to make knowledge accessible and protect it from distortion, “hence it is essential that knowledge advances through questioning”. Talking with human rights activist Teesta Setalvad in an interview, Thapar has added, “The need of the hour explore the real history of science in order to explore real achievements from early India.”

In sharp contrast to several water resources experts, such as Dr Tushaar Shah, who have long held that increase in groundwater levels witnessed in some parts of Gujarat has been caused by tens of thousands of checkdams built in the late 1990s, a just-published book, “The Sardar Sarovar Project: Assessing Economic and Social Impacts”, authored by an ex-bureaucrat and a senior expert, have insisted that this has taken place because of the availability of the Sardar Sarovar-supported canal network. The book has been coauthored by S Jagadeesan, who was managing-director of the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd (SSNNL) till about two years ago, and M Dinesh Kumar, executive director, Institute for Resource Analysis and Policy (IRAP), Hyderabad. In a paper Dr Shah wrote in association with Ashok Gulati, Hemant P, Ganga Shreedhar, and RC Jain, “Secret of Gujarat’s Agrarian Miracle after 2000” (“Economic and Political Weekly”, December 26, 2009), the senior experts had stated, “Several exogeno...

 Even as seeking removal of existing “barriers to formal employment” and abolition of “the most restrictive provisions" of the Industrial Dispute Act that require "prior government permission for employment termination and exit decisions", the apex body of European nations has asked the Government of India that any new changes in labour laws should aim at providing “a minimum floor of pay and social and labour protection conditions” for all workers, “irrespective of the status, size and activity of the firm.”

  Catherine Mann, chief economist of the  Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) , has come out in sharp defense of the view taken by Reserve Bank of India governor Dr Raghuram Rajan, who stirred controversy late last year-end by declaring Make for India was a better policy option to follow as against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India campaign. Talking with newspersons in Ahmedabad, Mann said, it would be better if India’s focus on “Make in India”  includes the “Make for India” concept of Dr Rajan.

 Contradicting the recent announcement by Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel, declaring that April 2015 onwards state-based enterprises will have to transfer two per cent of their profits towards the corporate social responsibility (CSR) fund of the Gujarat government, a top state insider said this is “simply not possible”. The insider, requesting anonymity, said, there is “no law in the state or India which makes it obligatory for the companies to hand over CSR funds to the government. The corporates will not agree as it is as it is against their interest.”

Noam Chomsky In a major boost to well-known human rights activist Teesta Setalvad – whom Gujarat police craving to arrest for allegedly “misusing” NGO funds meant for riot victims – more than 200 prominent individuals led by Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s most well-known philosophers, have expressed solidarity with her. Voted the "world's top public intellectual" in 2005 and considered father of modern linguists, he along with top historians Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar have called the Gujarat police's intention as a “clear case of the politics of vendetta.”

 One of India's topmost urban experts, Dr Isher Judge Ahluwalia, has taken strong exception to the Government of India's decision to go ahead with building 100 smart cities, as separate greenfield entities, as isolated islands away the existing towns and cities, without any notion about what they should look like. Ahluwalia, who was closely associated with the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), one of previous UPA government's flagship programmes, and continues to advise the Narendra Modi government on urban issues, insisted that there is lack of clarity on the concept of smart city in the Government of India.

An AKSM poster following efforts to dub it as terrorist body The Gujarat government believes it can go ahead and mine any part of Gujarat if it is not a scheduled area, and it does not need any permission or consultation from the village panchayats or the gram sabha under which a proposed mining area comes. This has been revealed in a state government document, which provides replies to a large number of social and economic issues raised by the Adivasi Kisan Sangharsh Manch (AKSM), which has been active in the tribal areas of Gujarat for the last nearly a decade.

Well-known British scholar Felix Padel -- great grandson of Charles Darwin, a social anthropologist who has made India his home for the last three decades -- has termed the Forest Rights Act (FRA) "a stop gap" arrangement against "appalling" projects threatening tribals. In an interview published in "Sanctuary Asia" (February 2015), Padel, also known for his activism on tribal rights issues, however, believes that the Act, with its emphasis on individual rather than collective rights, "threatens not just the continued existence of India’s forests, but also the continuance of all that is best in tribal societies."

After deciding to slash funds for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), the Government of India (GoI) has come up with an idea to insert a new bureaucratic layer of those seeking to implement the scheme, tom-tommed by the previous Congress-led government as one of its flagship programmes meant to alleviate poverty. The GoI wants to have as many one "barefoot engineers" in 2,500 blocks where the NREGS is being implemented in order to "assess" the work that is given to those employed under the national rural employment scheme.

MV Ramana                     Suvrat Raju  A major danger awaits Gujarat, if two senior physicists are to be believed. Suvrat Raju and MV Ramana, who have worked as scholars in the US, have said that the “most baffling feature” of the recent nuclear deal between the US and India is that it would allow Westinghouse, the top US company which has entered into an agreement with the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL), to supply two nuclear reactors for the proposed Mithi Virdi nuclear power plant in Gujarat which are “expensive and untested”.

Jayram Gamit Reports from the tribal belt of South Gujarat have said that a senior tribal farmers' leader, Jayram Gamit, has been "mysteriously picked up” by the cops from Tapi district under the Prevention of Anti-Social Activities Act (PASA Act) ahead of a major protest the organization he and another senior activist, Romel Sutariya, lead were going to launch and the land mafia.  Talking with Counterview from Chhotaudepur, Sutariya said, the district collector, Ranjeet Kumar, was under “tremendous pressure” from the local ruling party politicians to arrest Gamit following their campaign against efforts to hand over large tracts of tribal land to land tribals, particularly those who were mining the area surrounding the river.