Last evening, I was a little put off for a while. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, and new Gujarat BJP chief Vijay Rupani (whom I had known as a relatively more suave politician among many of his ilk) told media that the Gujarat government would provide 10 percent reservation to dominant castes having income less than Rs 6 lakh. It wasn’t reservation, already a contentious issue, which seemed to bother me immediately, as much as the figure, Rs 6 lakh. I wondered: Does it mean that a tax payer should be allowed reservation? As expected, in his one-upmanship, Congress’ opposition leader Shankarsinh Vaghela, an ex-BJP man, came up with the demand to raise the reservation limit to 20 per cent, and the income limit to Rs 12 lakh! What he was demanding was simply amazing. Many class one officers of the Gujarat government, except a few in the IAS, would be “allowed” reservation. I desperately searched for reaction. A scribe, who passionately covered the reservation ro...

Film makers Shubhradeep Chakravorty and Meera Chaudhary In a surprise move, India’s Censor Board chairman Pahlaj Ninalani has followed instructions from the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, in order to ban the documentary, “En Dino Muzaffarnagar” (Muzaffarnagar Today), inviting ire from well-known human rights advocate of the Supreme Court, Prashant Bhushan.

  A  Facebook post  has created flutter. Poster by  Ela Smetacek , who “lives in Delhi", the post talks of a national emergency having overtaken the forests in Uttarakhand. These forests, it says, “Have been burning for over a week now, with no media coverage whatsoever.”

  In a sharp admission, officials of the Gujarat government have told an NGO-sponsored workshop in Ahmedabad that during Narendra Modi’s tenure as chief minister, the state officialdom did “virtually nothing” in addressing the plight of the construction workers. The workshop was organized on the occasion of the International Workers Memorial Day, which is observed on April 28.

  By Our Representative Top Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan has sharply criticized the Government of India (GoI) for sitting on 170 recommendations by the Supreme Court collegium for appointments to High Courts over last two months, saying this has come about after the Supreme Court struck down the GoI’s wanting to have a National Judicial Appointments Commission.

A recent Financial Times Group thinktank may have claimed that Gujarat has turned into No 1 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) destination among all Indian and Chinese states (see  Counterview, April 22 ), but the Government of India’s (GoI’s) own  FDI data show that, far from being No 1 among the two countries, it is No 5 in India.

  In a strongly-worded critique of the efforts by the Government of India (GoI) to use Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) against non-government organizations (NGOs), a United Nations (UN) report has said terms such as ‘political objectives,’ ‘political activities,’ or ‘political interests’ are being applied against NGOs “in an arbitrary and capricious manner”.

Screenshot on which Sinha commented Gujarat's young human rights activist and social media campaigner Pratik Sinha has said that Facebook has "banned" him again, this time for three days. Reason, according to him, is a comment on the screentshot of a tweet by well-known Narendra Modi-supporter and commentator Minhas Merchant.

  United Nations (UN) special rapporteur Leilani Farha has taken strong exception to “discrimination” against minorities in housing in India's big cities, pointing towards how “private landlords, real estate brokers, and property dealers will often refuse to rent to someone who is Muslim, or impose unfair conditions.”

  A just-released World Bank report , “World Development Indicators 2016”, has found India’s business entry density, which calculates the number of newly registered limited liability corporations per 1,000 people in the age group 15–64, is one of the lowest in the world.

  Top global consultants Ernst & Young’s (E&Y’s) 14th Global Fraud Survey has found that a high 39 percent of business executives in India believe that “bribery/corrupt practices happen widely in business”, which is one of the highest in the world. Of the 57 countries surveyed, a higher percent of business executives of just 16 countries talked of existence of the malaise.

  Is Gujarat government refusing to spend enough on social sector in accordance with its capacity, as reflected in its high value of the gross state domestic product (GSDP)? It would seem so, if the latest data, released by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its “State Finances: A Study of State Budgets 2915-16”, are any indication.

  Latest Government of India data suggest that, despite the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) cleanliness dive launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in October 2014, 47.1 per cent of Gujarat’s rural population still defecates in the open, which is worse than as many as nine other major Indian states.

Bheemchhaya slum A new threat looms large over around 1,500 slum-dwelling families of Mumbai: The Ghar Bachao – Ghar Banao Abhiyan (GBGBA) has claimed that the Mangroves Cell of the Maharashtra forest department is likely to evict around 700 families after April 23 in Cheeta Camp and 800 in Bheemchhaya, Vikroli, Kannamwar Nagar in the first week of May.

Revisiting the 2002 communal violence in Gujarat, the US state department’s new 67-page  report  on human rights situation in India has expressed “concern” over the Gujarat government’s “failure to hold accountable those responsible for the 2002 communal violence in Gujarat that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,200 persons, the majority of whom were Muslim.”

  Ignoring Government of India taking strong  exception  to a United Nations (UN) special rapporteur (SR) report on caste-based discrimination, the United States (US) State Department’s “India 2015 Human Rights Report” has gone ahead and noted “significant discrimination against Dalits in access to services, such as health care, education, temple attendance, and marriage.”

  The recent Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) (Gujarat Amendment) Bill, 2016, passed in the state assembly and awaiting the Governor's accent, appears to all set drastically water down the high compensation amount stipulated in the Central LARR Act, passed in 2013 by the former UPA government.

 Sixty-odd medical experts from the US, UK, India, Brazil and Mexico have released a  statement  in support of a sin tax on sugar-sweetened beverages in India. The statement, which has been mailed to key Members of Parliament (MPs) and ministries in India this week, notes that a changing Indian diet is leading to an alarming increase in rates of obesity, type-2 diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases in India.

Non-hospitalized treatment: Urban reliance on govt hospitals (%) Gujarat is all set to “beat” all Indian states in privatization of basic healthcare services, if the latest data, released by the Government of India, are any indication. Based on primary survey, the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) data show that just about 24 per cent in Gujarat’s rural areas and 15 per cent in urban areas receive non-hospitalized treatment in government hospitals, while the rest rely on private facilities.

  By Our Representative Despite the prediction that the Indian economy would grow by 7.7 per cent next year, the World Bank in its latest report, “South Asia Economic Focus Spring 2016: Fading Tailwinds” has regretted that “private consumption growth” in the country has been driven “by non-agricultural (largely urban) households, as rural areas have been under stress.”

  Gujarat may be claiming to have provided the widest internet coverage compared to the rest of India through the state-sponsored Gujarat State Wide Area Network (GSWAN). However, a recent Government of India survey shows that access to internet in the state’s urban areas is just to 41.3 per cent of its households, which is far below the national average of 48.7 per cent.

  Three senior scholars at the Harvard Kennedy School, US, have said in a  recent scrutiny  that, while India “boasts superior rates of women serving in political office compared to other emerging economies”, yet the country not only “lags well behind its competitors in its rate of women’s labour force participation” but also letting women to go out of home alone.

In a surprise move, a top Dalit rights organization, Dalit Bahujan Adivasi Collective (DBAC), has taken strong exception to Prof Romila Thapar, one of the foremost historians of India, for the 2016 Ambedkar Memorial Lecture (AML) at the Ambedkar University, Delhi (AUD).

 A recent UNICEF document, “Reducing Child Marriage in India: A model to scale up results?” has sharply criticized the Government of India authorities for failing to sign up a more than five-decades old United Nations document crucial document seeking complete abolition of child labour.

  Amnesty International, one of the most influential human rights organization, has taken strong exception to the amendments passed by the Gujarat government to land acquisition laws, saying they “undermine the rights of communities to participation and genuine consultation.”

Wetland off Nirma cement plant A just-released book by senior Gujarat-based scholar Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly, who has served as professor at a top Indian IAS training institute, seeks to make a controversial suggestion: About the need to look at Gujarat not as a land of “Gandhi, Sardar Patel, and, of late, Narendra Modi”.

  Giving evidence from a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report on land acquisition and resettlement processes in Odisha, a recent study has noted serious slips between policy statements and performance on ground, providing enough space to “bolster” dilution of pro-farmer provisions of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Resettlement and Rehabilitation (LARR) Act, 2013, recently sought by the NDA government.

Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly, who has just finished her stint as professor at the Centre for Rural Studies, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, the premier institute which “trains” IAS babus in administrative skills, has come up with a new book – an “ethnographic” account of five major mass movements of Gujarat.

  In a new  study , apparently carried out from a World Bank perspective, three senior economists have said that in the early 1950s, just about 14 per cent of the poor lived in India’s urban areas; however, they note, “by 2012 this had risen to 35 per cent”, adding, “There is a sign of acceleration in the pace of the urbanization of poverty since 2000.”