By Our Representative Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-publicized Pradhan Mantri Matru Vendana Yojana (PMMVY), “launched” last year, will deprive entitlement to 57% of needy pregnant mothers. Revealing this, India’s well-known advocacy group, Right to Food Campaign (RFC) has said this is the direct consequence of restriction imposed to providing benefit to “to only the first birth”.

  India’s top advocacy group fighting for the workers employed under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, NREGA Sangharsh Morcha (NSM), has insisted that any budget less than Rs 80,000 crore would be “insufficient to meet even the projected demand for work timely payment of wages.”

Modi atop Narmada dam on September 17 Strongly arguing as to how the Narmada dam was filled up ahead of the Gujarat assembly elections, which took place in mid-December 2017, senior farmers' leader Sagar Rabari of Khedut Samaj – Gujarat (KSG) has said, quoting  official data , that on July 1, the water level in the 138.68 metre dam was at 114.97 metres, but on October 1, it was allowed to reach 130.74 metres, all to whip up sentiments of people around a river considered sacred by people.

Even as the Government of India has  chosen  nine more cities to make them "smart", a top data analysis site has revealed that less than a quarter of central funds for four major national programmes for India’s urban renewal have so far been either sanctioned or used.

Is Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani seeking to set up Gujarat's biggest China-backed steel plant in Mundra, Kutch district, without verifying that the promoter private company has not taken any environmental clearance? It would seem is, if a letter written by well-known environmental expert, Mahesh Pandya, to CK Mishra, secretary, Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change (MoEFCC), Government of India is any indication.

State of the garment sector workers in seven countries At a time when top Indian American economist Prof Arvind Panagariya, known to be close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi,  wants  Government of India (GoI) to drop the minimum wage criterion for labour-intensive garment sector to survive, top international NGO  Oxfam  said, wages in India’s garment sector are already one of the lowest in the seven countries it has studied.

Strongly refuting Gujarat government  claim  that just about 4.7 million acre feet (MAF) of water is available from Narmada dam, which is more than 50% -- or 9 MAF -- that should be made available to Gujarat, hence no Narmada water will be available for irrigation after March 15, top farmers' leader Sagar Rabari has wondered: How much land is being irrigated from the dam's water?

In a major embarrassment to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who addresses the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos on Tuesday, India ranks worse than all its neighbours in the new Inclusive Development Index (IDI) which it has released on the day WEF summit began in the Swiss city, January 22. Ranking 62nd out of 74 emerging economies, India's ranking is worse than not just China but also Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

A well-informed Gujarat government source has told Counterview that a major reason why the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd (SSNNL) recently  declared  there would be “no water” from the multi-purpose irrigation scheme, Sardar Sarovar dam, to Gujarat farmers starting March 15, 2018, is Madhya Pradesh elections, scheduled for this year-end.

  Members of the Campaign For Survival and Dignity (CSD), Odisha, a forest rights organization, have told Nanda Kumar Sai, chairperson of National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST), Government of India, that, contrary to huge propaganda by the state government, about 1.29 lakh out of a total of 6.05 lakh individual forest rights (IFR) claims have been rejected in Odisha.

  Following the Government of India decision to stop Haj Subsidy to Muslims, a minority rights organization has, in a letter to Union home minister Rajnath Singh, sought a white paper from the Government of India (GoI) on the types of subsidies being offered to different religious organizations.

  Top Indian American economist, Prof Arvind Panagariya, who  resigned  as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's top man in the Government of India’s think-tank Niti Ayog, has controversially said that India does not need Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) type of model, which are not job-intensive.

 Percent working children, age 14-18, India average The new Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2017: Beyond Basics), an annual survey carried by the high profile NGO Pratham, has found that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home district Mehsana has a whopping 20.3% children in the age group 14-18, who are not enrolled in either school or college.

  In a gruesome incident in Jharkhand, a 40-year-old tribal woman has reportedly died of starvation in Sewatand village of Giridih district. The woman has been identified as Budhni Soren. A widow, she is survived by her daughter Sunita, and seven-year-old son, who happened to be the only family member living with her. Budhni was not getting any ration, as leave aside Aadhaar, she did not even have a ration card.

  Amidst news of yet another starvation death in Jharkhand, the Right to Food Campaign, Jharkhand, has said that recent investigations by it has revealed “a clear and disturbing pattern” of the manner in which aadhaar has ended up excluding people from rations, pensions and jobs, generating “fake savings” in the bargain.

Two of the world's top human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (AI and HRW) , in a joint statement, have thrown their weight behind those opposing aadhaar, saying, the Government of India’s "mandatory biometric identification project, aadhaar, could lead to millions of people being denied access to essential services and benefits in violation of their human rights."

  Even as supporting the four senior-most judges'  open defiance  of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra, India's well-known legal rights NGO, Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms (CJAR), has pointed towards seven instances of what they call "abuse of power" by the CJI which is "destroying the image of the Supreme Court and subverting the course of justice."

Damayanti Dhar with Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani In a gruesome incident, which took place at the Civil Hospital, Ahmedabad, a young woman journalist, who writes for well-known news portal "The Wire", was manhandled On January 7 when she, accompanied another colleague from the daily, "Ahmedabad Mirror" (AM), were on their duty. They were seeking to ascertain facts related to M Mariraj, a third year Dalit resident doctor, who had attempted suicide claiming caste-based discrimination.

  A year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that the government would provide maternity benefit of Rs 6,000, under the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY), which succeeded the previous UPA government’s Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana (IGMSY), just about 1% of the targeted beneficiaries have so far been covered under the much-trumpeted scheme.

Veteran social scientist Prof Ghanshyam Shah, quoting data from the post-poll survey carried out by the top Delhi-based institute, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), has said that, despite what seemed to be a huge Patidar upsurge ahead of the Gujarat state assembly elections under the leadership of young Hardik Patel, majority of the community voted for the BJP, though the party's voting share in the community did come down.

Anil Vardhan (right) with Martin Macwan While young Dalit painter Anil Vardhan is all set to go ahead with his third one-man show in Ahmedabad's Ravishankar Raval Kala Bhavan on paintings (click  HERE ) which which seek to provide an exposure into his experiments with colour intermingled with his love for music, a tete-a-tete with the young artist revealed his other side -- his deep anger over atrocities on Dalits and their incessant fight against untouchability.

  A five-month-old video of Gujarat's top Dalit face, Jignesh Mevani, "dug up" by a right-wing channel, finds Mevani, who won from the Vadgam with the direct support of Congress president Rahul Gandhi in the recent state assembly polls, controversially accusing sections of the Dalit movement as infected with Manuvaad and Brahminism, the terms used by Dalit ideologues to condemn casteism.

The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the country's top independent consultant, has said that the fiscal 2017-18 "is likely to go down as the worst possible year for investments in India", predicting, "New investment proposals are likely to stabilise around Rs 8 trillion in 2017-18, which would be about 60 per cent of the new proposals made during 2016-17 and would be the lowest level since 2004-05."

  Even as taking issue with those who talk of "jobless growth", well-known pro-Modi economist Arvind Panagariya, who resigned as vice-chairman of the Planning Commission's new avatar, Niti Ayog, has said, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way in which employment in India, is calculated, insisting, "though the unemployment rate in India is low, the country does suffer from a serious long-term underemployment problem".