JICA India office chief meeting farmers' representatives in Ahmedabad  Chief representative of Japan International Co-operation Agency’s (JICA) India office Katsuo Matsumoto, who visited the office of senior Gujarat High Court advocate Anandvardhan Yagnik in Ahmedabad on August 30, has handed over a crucial report  it had prepared on its December 8-9, 2018 meeting with Gujarat and Maharashtra farmers, affected by the high-profile Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project, as also senior activists.

In a surprising assertion, Andy Levin, who represents Michigan’s 9th District in the United States Congress, and is also a foreign policy expert, has gone a long way to suggest that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Kashmir move -- to take away the state's special status -- wouldn't face opposition from influential quarters internationally.

A recent report, “Status of Policing in India Report” (SPIR) has found that 14% police personnel feel Muslims are ‘very much’ naturally prone to committing crimes, while 36% feel they are ‘somewhat’ naturally prone to committing crimes. Also, 25% personnel, according to survey (to a large extent and somewhat combined), feel that “natural for a mob to punish the culprit in case of cow slaughter.”

Close on the heels of top international environmental NGO Greenpeace reportedly identified six coal-fired power plants and industrial clusters as India’s “worst nitrogen oxides (NOx) hotspots” on the basis of data from Tropomi, a Dutch satellite instrument, the NGO has now found, on the basis of data obtained from NASA, that India houses 13 of the world’s top 40 anthropogenic sulfur dioxide (SO2) emitting hotspots, resulting from coal combustion.

  A new  report , “Enemies of the State?: How governments and businesses silence land and environmental defenders”, published by Global Witness, a human rights organization based in London, has said that India saw the third highest number of activists killed, 23, in 2018 following Philippines 30 and Columbia 24.

Even as the Government of India’s controversial move to abrogate Article 370 of the Constitution and bifurcate Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) into two union territories is not only refusing to down die but has acquired international dimensions, a recent study, published by the Cambridge University Press, has claimed “pro-independence attitudes” among that 65% of Kashmiris, warning, this sentiment worsens when the state machinery resorts “repressive violence”.

Is the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), India’s premier organization representing mainly working women in the informal sector of Ahmedabad, and cooperatives promoted by it, readying themselves to enter into the new arena of finding a space in the online market? It would seem so, if a two-day SEWA workshop, in which, among others, tens of representatives of national and international women’s cooperatives participated is any indication.

A study funded, among others, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, seeking to analyse what it calls person-centred maternity care or PCMC, has found that 57% of the 1,475 women surveyed taking maternity care in India reported that health service providers, including hospital managers, doctors and nurses, “never asked permission before performing medical procedures”, while 69% of women “reported that providers did not explain the purpose of examinations or procedures”.