In a sharp observation, scholars of a recent high-profile study, "Cash and the Economy: Evidence from India's Demonetization", whose results have been widely reported , have bemoaned: That there is lack of authentic official data on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with the Government of India, forcing them to use “nightlights data”, a methodology usually adopted by top international scholars to assess socio-economic growth in highly underdeveloped countries of East Africa and parts of Asia, where no authentic ground level surveys are available to assess development.

Has unease finally begun creeping into the majoritarian psyche, which got swayed under the powerful Hindutva wave that followed the 2002 Gujarat riots? It would seem so, if journalist and film-maker Revati Laul’s just released book, “The Anatomy of Hate”, is any indication. The book does not say so in so many words, yet suggests that disconcerting traits for the Sangh Parivar have even sneaked into those who directly or indirectly participated in the violence which engulfed the state 16 years ago.

Jagdish Thakkar in PM office. Left: Kishore Anjaria, a previous colleague A public relations officer (PRO), even as maintaining anonymity, is supposed to “manage” reputation of his or her client, reflecting the client’s views in order to influence opinion and behaviour. A PRO is also known to use, the world over, media and communication to build, maintain, manage and plan publicity strategies and campaigns, even as dealing with enquiries from the public, particularly media, organising promotional events such as press conferences, open days, exhibitions, tours and visits. A PRO is also supposed to final touches to press statements for his or client.

An international interdisciplinary journal, “Earth System Science Data (ESSD)”, has raised the alarm that global fossil CO2 emissions in India grew at a rate of +5.2% per year on an average during the last one decade (2008-17), and are expected to grow even higher in 2018. Suggesting that this growth is higher than China’s CO2 emissions, an increase of +3.0%, an article in the journal says, while the global average for the decade was 1.5 % per year, the emissions decreased in the European Union (EU) countries by −1.8%.

Consumer Confidence Indices Results of the Consumer Confidence Survey (CCS), carried out by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for November 2018, suggest that growing pessimism on general economic situation and employment scenario. Conducted in 13 major cities – Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Chennai, Delhi, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Patna and Thiruvananthapuram - RBI said, "Future expectations index (FEI) also moderated due to lower optimism on the employment scenario and household spending." Based on 5,326 responses on households’ perceptions and expectations on the general economic situation, the employment scenario, the overall price situation and their own income and spending, the survey results show, to quote RBI, that the current situation index (CSI) "declined further in November 2018 in a phase that commenced in November 2016, on the back of growing pessimism on the general economic situation and the employment scenario as also some cutb...

This should sound some music to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his supporters: More than four years after he took over reins of power, the view appeared to have strong at an international scholars’ conference, held in Anand, Gujarat, that Modi should set aside democratic ways to achieve his declared intention to double farmers’ incomes, and instead adopt the type of means adopted by China to attain higher earnings.

Mihir Shah Has the Government of India shelved the Mihir Shah committee report , which two years ago had recommended setting up an overarching National Water Commission (NWC) in order to build partnerships with independent experts and civil society groups for participatory management of water resources? It would seem so, if committee members and government officials participating in an international conference in Anand, Gujarat, are to be believed. Organized by the high-profile Colombo-based International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in alliance with the Tata Water Policy Programme, and begun at the sprawling campus of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) campus in Anand, the three day conference is being held to discuss “innovations in water, land, energy and ecosystems” in order to build “climate resilience for doubling farmers’ incomes.” Addressing media, Himanshu Kulkarni, one of the members of the Mihir Shah committee, which was appointed by the Narendra Modi governmen...

  A 14-year-old boy and his older brother were hired by an agent from Bihar under the pretext of getting them a job in a shoe factory in Uttar Pradesh. The agent brought with him a dozen-odd to Uttar Pradesh under the pretext of offering work to them in a factory. Only upon arrival in Muzaffarnagar, the boys were told that they would be working in a sugarcane field.

  A recent report, prepared by researchers with the civil rights group, Agrasar, has revealed that of the 521 children from marginalized groups surveyed in Gurugram, Haryana, 80% said they are punished at school. Based on data collected from semi-urban communities in Gurugram, the report’s conclusions also take into account survey 100 parents, personal interviews with 26 children, three focus group discussions and one seasonal calendar exercise with 29 parents.

In a letter two senior environmentalists of Gujarat, Rohit Prajapati and Krishna Kant, have asked above a dozen senior Government of India and Government of Gujarat officials, to declare chemical emergency in the Vadodara district, pointing out that the Effluent Channel Project (ECP) of Vadodara, which is in force along 24 villages' prime agricultural land, known as the Vegetable Basket of Gujarat, is polluting land next to the 55.6 km long effluent channel.

  Sharply reacting to Counterview story (click  HERE ), which said, quoting Gujarat government sources, that the state's farmers will not be provided with Narmada waters this summer because the waters would diverted to Madhya Pradesh agricultural fields in view of the elections there this year, a top aide of Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani has said, "There is real shortage, and this the only reason why Gujarat farmers wouldn't be able to get waters."

A South Gujarat-based environmental NGO, Prakruti Suraksha Mandal (PSM), has raised the alarm that a large number of illegal borewells have come up in and around industrial estates of Bharuch district, sharply reducing groundwater levels and polluting the water. PSM director Salim Patel, in a letter to senior officials of the Central Groundwater Authority (CGA), Government of India, and Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB), has said that at several places industrial units have been found to be illegally releasing untreated water underground. And, even after repeated complaints, GPCB has not taken any action against industrial units. Patel said, the information it received under the Right to Information (RTI) Act revealed that just 67 units of the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) estate in Ankaleshwar have taken permission from the authorities for constructing borewells.  Clearly, there are many more units which have constructed borewells illegally, he asserts, ad...

  A just-released study, “The Pneumonia and Diarrhea Progress Report 2018”, prepared by the International Vaccine Access Centre (IVAC) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has identified India among 15 other countries which are still far off the mark in achieving the targets of the Global Action Plan for the Prevention of Pneumonia and Diarrhea (GAPPD).

A just-released Harvard Kennedy School study has estimated that, today in India, 71% of men use mobile phones, as against 38% of women, pointing out that India, along with Pakistan and Bangladesh, are “clear outliers among countries of similar levels of development”, exhibiting “some of the world’s highest gender gaps in access to technology.”

India's poverty estimates using separate methods While the Indian authorities are basking in happiness over the World Bank, in a recent report, showing that India has jumped 23 places to the 77th position in ‘ease of doing business’, another Bank  report , “Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle”, released last month, has found “important measurement issues” that “temper confidence” in India’s poverty estimates.

  In a little known development, Gujarat's Dalit face Jignesh Mevani has threatened Muslim organizations, which have claimed to have "resettled" thousands of 2002 riot victims, that he would boycott meetings called by them anywhere in India. Mevani's threat comes close on the heels of complaints by tens of riot victims that they are sought to be evicted by the very same organizations that had allowed them to settle down on their land in the aftermath of the riots.

Several senior environmentalists and academics of Vadodara have written an open letter to the Municipal Commissioner, Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC), asking the administration to take immediate steps to “immediately stop demolition, tree felling and clearing of vegetation, dumping of debris, discharge of untreated sewage, dredging, digging, filling, leveling, construction, etc. along the city’s Vishwamitri river and its environs.”

The Kutir: A cottage? Have you ever heard of a Gandhi museum, sough to be projected as the “largest” on the Mahatma, yet totally inaccessible, in sharp contrast to Ahmedabad’s humble, approachable and unassuming Gandhi Ashram on the banks of Sabarmati, set up by the Mahatma during the heydays of the freedom movement? It exists about 30 kilometres away, its idea was conceived by none other than a person who has today become even more inaccessible than he ever was: Narendra Modi, India's Prime Minister.

Even as claiming that between 2000 and 2015, real wages in India grew in every sector, including in agriculture and in unorganised manufacturing and services, at the compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 3 per cent, a recent study finds a variation across sectors: Thus, from 2010 to 2015, real wages grew faster, at a CAGR of 4 per cent for unorganised manufacturing, 5 per cent for unorganised services, and 7 per cent for agriculture.

  In an important revelation, a recent study in one of the world’s most renowned health research journals, “Lancet”, has found that “model” Gujarat is one of the three states where the Suicide Death Rate (SDR) among women has gone up. The other two major states, whose women’s SDR has shown an upward trend during the 26-years study – 1990 to 2016 – period are Bihar and Rajasthan.

Thousands of adivasis and forest dwellers from across Odisha, mostly from tribal regions, marched in a protest rally on September 28 under the banner of Campaign for Survival and Dignity (CSD), Odisha, at Lower PMG, Bhubaneswar, raising concern over “anti-tribal” and “anti-forest dweller” laws like Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016 (commonly known as CAMPA) and Draft National Forest Policies 2018.

  A 13-state survey carried out a Delhi-based non-profit organization, CMS India, has found that in “model” Gujarat’s just about 12% households households feel that the Narendra Modi government is “committed” towards reducing corruption, which is the lowest of all states, with the sole exception of Andhra Pradesh, where just about 2% of feel that way.

Hundreds of elderly, widows, single women and differently-abled persons from different districts of Jharkhand gathered near the Raj Bhavan in Ranchi for a public hearing organized by the Jharkhand Right to Food Campaign and Pension Parishad demanding the right to universal social security pensions ahead of World Elderly Day on October 1.

A just-published paper, “Political role models and child marriage in India”, has concluded that the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments, enacted in 1993, which stipulate reservation of pradhans’ positions in one-third of districts by rotation, has led to a situation where the “likelihood of child marriage decreases by 20 percentage points, and age at marriage increases by 2.3 years”, even as delaying the “gauna ceremony is delayed by 1.6 years.”

  A recent research paper, “The impact of women’s age at marriage on own and spousal labor market outcomes in India: causation or selection?” has said that even though women earn nearly half of what men earn, a delay in marriage, at least in India, has “no significant impact” on their earnings.

Sharply contesting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim that the  recently-launched  public health insurance scheme, Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY), dubbed Modicare, is the world’s largest, renowned development economist Jean Drèze notes, PMJAY is nowhere comparable to “China’s health care system, with its universal coverage”, pointing out, “In per-capita terms, public expenditure on health in China is about five times higher than in India.”

  Fresh data released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), released this month, show that while India ranks 130 out of 189 countries in human development index (HDI), with HDI value of 0.640 on a scale of 1, this is “below the average of 0.645 for countries in the medium human development group”, even though it is “above the average of 0.638 for countries in South Asia.”

The United Nations special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Tendayi Achiume, in a new  report  to the UN General Assembly, has revealed that she has written a letter to the Government of India taking strong exception to "updating of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a process governed by local authorities in the state of Assam."

The United Nations (UN) secretary-general’s  annual report  to the ongoing 39th session of the Human Rights Council has taken strong exception to the manner the Government of India has been using “reprisals” against the human rights defenders who have been “cooperating” with the United Nations’ (UN’s) different panels.

  The Chinese Communist Party Central Committee's powerful English language daily "Global Times" has taken strong exception to what it has called "twice-postponed two plus two ministerial dialogue between the US and India", which took place on September 6 in New Delhi, saying the meetings suggest "India views China as the main threat to its rise."

  By Rajiv Shah  Gallup, a well-known American research-based global performance-management consulting company with expertise in public opinion polls, has said that Indians' life ratings have been consistently going down, from 5 on a scale 10 in 2010 to to 4 in 2017. Pointing out that India's life ratings “are especially low in the rural East”, where almost half of residents "struggle to afford food", Gallup, in its new findings has predicted, regional disparities “may affect 2019 parliamentary elections.”

Danish Rajab Jhat The well-known American journal "Time", in a report exclusively focussed on the controversial use of the pallet guns to quell disturbances in the Kashmir Valley in 2016, taking the testimony of nine victims, has said that all of their scars, caused by what are called "non-lethal" weapons, have pushed them, as also hundreds others, fully or partially into "darkness."

The World Bank in its latest assessment has found the Ganga rejuvenation project “unsatisfactory and risky”, underlining, the risk today is “substantial”. Noting this, a two-series report on Ganga says, this is a clear departure from its earlier assessment in the report “Implementation Status and Result Report” of May 2018 when it found the project’s implementation “moderately unsatisfactory”.

  A just released study has found that India has the distinction of having the third highest number of gun-related deaths out of 195 countries surveyed. Published by the American Medical Association, the study, released on August 28, shows that a total of 26,500 firearm-related deaths took place in India in 2016. Brazil tops the list with 43,200 deaths, followed by United States 37,200.

Three senior economists, one of whom is a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Reserve Bank of India, Prof Ravindra H Dholakia, have questioned the methodology adopted by the Government of India in 2015 for calculating gross domestic product (GDP), suggesting, while replacing the base year from 2004-05 to 2011–12, a much higher industrial growth rate has been estimated than what actually is the case.

Sharply criticizing the Government of India for the “withdrawal of the state from the public sphere, especially that pertaining to where the majority of Indians and especially women live and labour”, a UN Women-sponsored study says that there has been “declining investment in public provisioning of… goods and services that have a direct impact on … unpaid and paid work of women.”

A top New York-based data analysis firm, CEIC Data, has  revealed  that India's investment accounted for 30.8 % of its nominal GDP in March 2018, a little higher than 30.1 % in the previous quarter. However, it conceded, India's investment share of nominal GDP data from June 2004 to March 2018 averaged 35.1 %, as against the all-time high of 41.2 % in September 2011. It reached a record low of 29.6 % in March 2017, post-demonetization.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in early 1990s, referring to fact that there are far more men than women in India, relative to developed countries, dubbed this as "the missing women phenomenon". The reasons he cited included sex-selective abortion and excess female mortality at early ages due to parental preferences for sons.

The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, in its recent report on Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSE), has qualified public sector undertakings’ (PSUs') funding the 182-metre world’s highest Sardar Statue, currently being constructed in the Narmada river downstream of the Sardar Sarovar dam as an “ineligible” corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity.

  In what might sound as music to India's corporate honchos and their political supporters, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has calculated that the trade union (TU) density in India among wage workers, both casual and regular/salaried, has fallen since 1993–94, by 3 percentage points to 13.4 per cent. Worse, the top Union Nations (UN) body, headquartered in Geneva, has further notes, the “density among regular/salaried workers has fallen precipitously since 1993–94, by 17.7 percentage points to 28.8 per cent.”

VD Savarkar What Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the BJP's Hindutva icon, said about religious books should completely shake those who think that scriptures are a gospel truth and shouldn't be criticized, and there is nothing beyond them. Quoted by Narendra Dabholkar, a Pune-based rationalist who was  shot dead  allegedly by a Hindu fanatic on August 20, 2013, Savarkar had said, “The Vedas, the Avesta, the Bible and the Koran are but man-made tomes and should be studied accordingly...”

A recently-released Report of the Committee on Real Sector Statistics, published by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government busted the myth that the rate of economic growth under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been higher than the earlier two terms of the UPA government headed by Manmohan Singh. The report has made available Gross Value Product (GDP) data 1993-94 onwards, calculated on the basis of the new series, implemented in January 2015, which show, according to expert calculations, that India's GDP annually grew on an average at 8.34% and 7.67% under Singh's two terms as Prime Minister, in 2004-05 to 2008-09 and 2009-10 to 2013-14, respectively. The calculations further show that under the two phases when the BJP-led governments -- under AB Vajpayee and Modi -- the average growth rate was 5.73% per annum (1998-99 to 2003-04) and 7.34% (2014-15 to 2017-18). Average annual growth rate The new series calculated GDP at 2011-12 prices, and till th...

  A new study carried out by the Bandhkam Mazdoor Sangathan (BMS), Gujarat’s biggest non-government organization (NGO) working for the welfare of construction workers in the state, has found that none of the workers working for the high profile Ahmedabad  metro project , currently being implemented across the city, has been registered with the Gujarat Building and Other Construction Workers’ Board.

Expressing serious concern over the proposed Vishwamitri Riverfront Development Project (VRDP) in Vadodara, Gujarat’s cultural capital, on lines of the Sabarmati riverfront project in Ahmedabad, showcased as urban model for other states to follow, prominent citizens of the city have come together to demand “a thorough and immediate re-look” into it and “reconceptualize” it. “A major problem with the proposed plans and designs is that they fail to recognize that Vishwamitri river is not like the Sabarmati in Ahmedabad, or Tapi in Surat”, they say.

India Ratings and Research (Ind-Ra), the top Indian subsidiary of the Fitch Group, a global leader in financial information services, believes if the declining trend of household saving continues, it may pose a "serious challenge to the gross domestic product (GDP) growth and macroeconomic stability."

US-Mexico border An explosive report by the US newspaper “Los Angles Times” (LAT) has revealed, quoting Federal Bureau of Prisons figures, that of the 680 migrants detained in early August at the federal prison in Victorville, California, a state in south-western US, a whopping 380 were Indian nationals. LAT adds, about 40% of the detainees at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Imperial Valley facility, also in California, are Indians, and nearly 20% of detainees at ICE Adelanto processing centre, again in California, too, are Indians.

  Is Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking to "barter" the Tibetan cause in exchange of China giving up some of its territorial claims? It would seem so, if a top report published in one of Japan's most powerful media outfits, Nikkei, is any indication.

Oil spill at Nagrol beach, Gujarat How very roughshod could Gujarat government be in offering consultation with stakeholders for preparing the Coastal Zone Management Plan (CZMP) for the state could be seen from what has been called “CZMP predraft maps” for eight coastal districts – Bhavnagar, Probandar, Devbhumi Dwarka, Gir Somnath, Amreli, Junagadh, Ahmedabad and Anand – for comments and suggestions before finalizing them.