A protest against land acquisition A Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) study has revealed that the NDA government has not just refused to invoke crucial provisions of the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act, 2013 -- social impact assessment (SIA) and people's consent -- for acquiring land ever since it came to power. It has not even invoked some of the "positive" provisions of LARR Act, which remain intact in the ordinances, issued by it to dilute SIA and consent.

Top international consultants AT Kearney have noted that, despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India drive, India has dropped from the top 10 positions in foreign direct investment (FDI) confidence index for the first time since 2002. In a just-released report, “Connected Risks: Investing in a Divergent World”, the consultants’ rankings show that India in 2015 ranks No 11th, down from the seventh position in 2014.

DD Kosambi A top US-based Hindutva scholar, representing a prominent pro-Narendra Modi thinktank, has regretted that right-wing historians in India have failed to develop what he calls "alternate history or even a robust theology in academia, either within India or the West." In a well-researched  article  titled "Saving History from Historians", Murali Balaji says, there is in fact, a "general lack of interest by most Indian academics to pursue a robust Hindu theological scholarly agenda."

  Counterview Desk While the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT), the ambitious state-driven “smart” city project envisaged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi about seven eight ago, has refused a right to information (RTI) applicant, Roshan Shah, any details regarding details of the progress made in the project, an influential international business daily has created flutter by  revealing  facts on slow progress in the ‘smart’ city project.

The Narendra Modi government -- which allowed a more stringent Prevention of Atrocities (PoA) Ordinance, promulgated by the previoius UPA government in March 2014, to lapse after it came to power -- wants to "secure" Dalit votes for the forthcoming Bihar assembly polls. According to sources, it has "decided" to introduce the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Bill this monsoon session of Parliament.

\ A well-researched Dutch report, which has sharply criticized Gujarat and Rajasthan governments for failing to take any steps against child labour in Bt cotton farms, has surprisingly praised multinational corporations (MNCs), including the controversial Monsanto, for taking “exemplary” initiatives in fighting the evil. It has said, efforts by “Bayer, Monsanto, Du Pont and few local companies have had some positive impact in reducing the number of working children.”

Even as top human rights activist Teesta Setalvad got much-needed  relief  from the Bombay High Court, which stayed her arrest till August 10, a statement by the two trusts she heads have said that only in certain “emergency situations” they engaged in “relief and rehabilitation” activities. But that never was, or claimed by us to be, their “main purpose.”

 A new report, ‘Cotton’s Forgotten Children’, released in The Hague, has expressed serious concern over the fact that the number of child workers, who haven't reached adolescence and working in cotton farms, has gone up by a whopping 30,000 since 2010 in Gujarat and Rajasthan. As for adolescent children, the report says, the numbers have gone up by another 70,000.

  In a gruesome incident in a town situated situated just about 60 kilometres from  one of India's topmost business hubs, Ahmedabad, Dalits were badly beaten up, with authorities remaining "indifferent". In a letter to Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel, one of the members of the family which claimed to have become "victim" of the brawl caused by objections to occupying a public space for private function has complained that, despite strong plea, the Dalits were "refused" police protection.

In a surprise move, the Government of India has initiated the exercise of collecting data on attacks on whistleblowers, mediapersons, social workers and right to information (RTI) activists from across the country. This, it is learnt, is in response Parliamentarians’ frequent plea for the number of attacks on RTI activists.

Top international consultants, Pricewaterhouse Coopers and multinational NGO Save the Children have said that Government of India's (GoI's) ambitious smart city project has ignored "child-friendly” and “inclusive” approach. Their just-released new report, “Forgotten voices: The world of urban children in India”, says that while “defining” the smart cities scheme, the GoI failed to go “beyond accommodating the aspirations of the new middle class comprising of professionals and investors”.

According to reports from Gujarat's Alang, touted by the state officialdom as Asia's biggest shipbreaking yard, the number of active plots which take up ship recycling in order to extract steel and other economically useful material has fallen by 50 per cent over the last one year. Worse, the number of vessels which beached at Alang for ship recycling dropped to the six-year old of 275, with just about 54 ships reaching the yard over the last three months.

  A global survey by top international bankers, HSBC, has suggested that most Indian parents consider professional success more important than a happy life for their children. Titled  The Value of Education: Learning for Life , the study, which is based on a survey of 5,500 parents across 16 countries in the world, says that 49 per cent of them said a happy life for their children was important, worst in the world.

Mystery surrounds a whopping 2.26 lakh pre-matric applications for minority scholarship for the year 2014-15, “missing” from the list of about 5.87 lakh pleas made for those studying in classes 1 to 10. In a right to information (RTI) reply, the Gujarat government has “revealed” that of the 5,66,823 applications it forwarded to the Government of India, 3,35,561 applications were “accepted”, and another 5,176 applications were “rejected”.

Close on heels of the CBI  raid  on the official premises of Sabrang Communications and Publishing Pvt Ltd, top human rights defender Teesta Setalvad has declared that the organization she and her husband, Javed Anand head "has broken no law", qualifying the raid "political vendetta". In a statement circulated through South Asia Citizens Web, Setalvad has quoted Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), 2010, to prove her point.

An inter-state comparison of 21 major states of the highest level of education attained by India’s rural populace, as reflected in the recently-released Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), reveals an interesting picture. The data suggest that Gujarat, touted as the “model state” for education, may have the sixth lowest per cent of illiterates in the country (31.01 per cent) – following Kerala (11.38 per cent), Himachal Pradesh (22.05 per cent), Uttaranchal (25.41 per cent), Tamil Nadu (26.38 per cent) and Maharashtra (26.96 per cent). At the same time, Gujarat has 13 per cent of rural people who are literates but have not completed primary education, as they may have dropped-out. This is higher than as many as 10 other states with a lower proportion of such literates in this category. The data, which further provide the highest education level completed at primary, middle, secondary, higher secondary and graduate and above levels, suggest that rural Gujarat’s performance progressiv...

  One of the major “policy thrusts” adopted by the Government of India is known to be to follow a still unexplained “Gujarat model of education” for the country as a whole. Not only very little official information is available on what this “model” is and how top policy makers wish to pursue it, latest data of the Socio Economic and Caste Survey (SECC), released by the Centre suggest that Gujarat one of the worst performers at higher levels of learning.

Impact of globalization is now being felt in a major sector, India's software industry, which is known to depend heavily on clientele from multinational corporations (MNCs). International giants, such as International Business Machines Corp (IBM), Amazon.com and Accenture PLC, are fast giving up their practice of outsourcing servers and accessing software via personal computers.

World’s top civil society organizations (CSOs), in a joint submission to the UN-sponsored International Conference on Financing for Development, taking place at Addis Ababa from July 13 to 16, has taken strong exception to the effort of governments to provide “central role” to private finance in achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs). They drafted their submission at Addis Ababa on July 11-12.

  The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has come up with a $865,000 dollars "action plan" to improve livelihood and environment in the villages situated along Kutch coast especially in Mundra, which has turned into a major hot spot for industrial development in India. Mundra has one of the biggest private ports of India, owned by Adanis, a special economic zone, also developed by Adanis, and two power plants owned by Tata Group and Adani Group.

Venkataraman A Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) thinktank report, based on a discussion organized by it in Chennai, has floated a new idea -- that non-government organizations (NGOs) should be brought under right to information (RTI) Act. The thinktank is known to organize discussions on different policy issues nagging the government, and indirectly presents a particular corporate view of what should be done on the issues before the officialdom.

Medha Patkar In a gruesome incident, Tembhrya Kutarya, an adivasi of Chimalkhedi village, barely 10-odd km from from the prestigious Sardar Sarovar Dam on Narmada river, consumed poison and committed suicide. Situated across the border in Maharashtra, the news from the village, says prominent social activist Medha Patkar, "reveals the actual dire reality underlying the false tall claims of rehabilitation by the Maharashtra government."

The latest Socio Economic and Caste Survey (SECC) 2011, released recently by Government of India, has revealed that, despite claims of Gujarat "model" to remove poverty, things are not so rosy as it may seem for the vulnerable sections of rural population. Not only do a much higher proportion of families in Gujarat live in kuccha houses, more Dalit households are dependent on manual casual labour than most of the 21 major states.

 A just-released report has said that the states which have a long history of conflict between government forces and militant groups have "fewer incidence" of death sentences being awarded. It says, Jammu & Kashmir and Manipur, where the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Acts (AFSPA) is in force, the number of death sentences awarded are "much fewer compared to states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh."

Christine Mehta A senior activist-researcher Ramesh Gopalakrishnan has  questioned  premier human rights organisation Amnesty International's silence over the deportation of one of its ex-senior-most activists Christine Mehta, a US citizen and person of Indian origin, from India in November last year. Mehta was instrumental in authoring the by now well-known Amnesty  report  "Denied" on human rights violations in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K).

  A new set of data of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011 has contradicted the income data released by it previously. They surprisingly go to suggest that Gujarat’s rural story may not as grim as it seemed. While the earlier data still remain on the SECC site (click  HERE ), showing that just about 5.19 per cent of households have highest earning members earning more than Rs 10,000, the fresh data revises this percentage to 9.57 per cent (click  HERE ).

The Voluntary Action Network of India (VANI), the country’s apex body of 500 NGOs, has asked the Ministry of Home Affairs to immediately stop “surprise visits by local intelligence bureau (IB) cops to NGO offices. In a letter to MHA, Harsh Jaitli, CEO,VANI, has said, the view is strong among them that they are “victim of local IB and police who often visit uninformed and most often do not share their purpose and identity proofs.”

The latest Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) released recently by the Government of India suggests what is by now a well-known fact, reiterated over and over again by different survey — that there are more landless among the Dalits (scheduled castes or SCs) and Adivasis (scheduled tribes or STs) in India’s rural areas than those identified as “Others”, consisting of upper caste Hindus, other backward castes (OBCs) and minorities. Coming to Gujarat, which is touted as a developed state, the charts below, prepared on the basis of the SECC data, further suggest, there are more landless among the state’s Dalits in the rural areas compared to most of the 21 major states selected for the sake of analysis. In fact, an analysis of the data suggests that there are 63.24 per cent Dalit landless households dependent on casual manual labour to earn livelihood, as against 35.62 per cent Adivasis and 35.04 per cent Others. The charts below are self-explanatory: 1. Gujarat has one of the bigge...

  A just-released report, “State of Information Commissions and the Use of RTI Laws in India: Rapid Study Based on the Annual Reports of Information Commissions”, prepared by a team of researchers headed by Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) has said that Gujarat has one of the highest proportion of rejection of right to information (RTI) applications, close to a fifth (19.5 per cent), for reasons not pertaining to the RTI Act.

The income criterion is one of the main factors in the Socio Economic Caste Census (SECC) in identifying how well do different sections of India’s rural households live, or do not live. While the erstwhile Planning Commission rejected the income factor, saying it did not provide sufficient understanding of the well being of rural households, the Niti Ayog appears to take a different view. Niti Ayog vice-chairman Prof Arvind Panagariya believes, he does not think that the “conventional poverty analysis based on the expenditure surveys loses its significance”, adding, it might additionally help identify “a separate official poverty line based on expenditure.” While identifying the earning capacity in rural households, the SECC data represent only the income of the highest earner, which means the household as a whole may have higher earnings. However, there is little reason to believe, says expert M Vijayabaskar, assistant professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, that t...

 A fortnight after the UN drafting committee deliberated on the final draft of the revised Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 after taking suggestions from all the stakeholders, including an Indian civil society network led by Wada Na Todo Abhiyan and Oxfam India, several of the country’s well-known NGOs met in Ahmedabad to deliberate on the type of institutions needed to achieve SDGs. The effort allegedly was to "nationalize SDGs" in western India.