Subramanian Swamy with Modi I have had a special liking for GDP, and it isn’t new, either. During my Times of India days in Gandhinagar (1997-2012), I remember, how as chief minister, Narendra Modi, post-2002 Gujarat riots, kept harping on the state’s double digit rate of growth rate continuously for three or four years, but got a little puzzled when, during a press conference, I asked him how was it that an official document talked of just 5.1% growth rate. Perplexed, he kept quiet for a little more than a minute, looked around for an answer, and finally got one from the then finance secretary, who, sitting behind him, murmured something in his ear. “It so happens that when your GDP rate is very high for several years, it reaches a plateau, and then the possibility of as big a rise becomes difficult”, he told the media. A good explanation, I thought, but wondered, why was it that he continued harping on the double rate of growth for so long, when it wasn’t the case. During those years...

Outside a public toilet in Ahmedabad Gujarat's share in the death of manual scavengers due to asphyxiation in gutters has been a whopping 17% of India, or 130 out of 776. Union social justice and empowerment minister Ramdas Athawala has told the Lok Sabha that of the 130 deaths in Gujarat, which took place since 1993, the state government has compensated a sum of Rs 10 lakh, as required by a Supreme Court judgment, only in 50 cases.

  “Model” Gujarat’s rural areas continue to suffer from a major lag in the drainage system, if the latest Government of India (GoI) report, “Drinking Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and Housing Condition”, a survey carried out between July and December 2018 across the country, is any indication.

  A recent UNESCO report has noted that, despite “encouraging declines in stunting” among infants across the world under the age of five, the global reductions cannot “mask the reality that, in many countries, huge proportions of children still suffer from stunting”.

Old Surajbari bridge, proposed spot of the dam to "stop" sea water ingress Top Saurashtra industrialist Jaysukhbhai Patel’s by now controversial proposal to convert the 4,900 sq km Little Rann of Kutch area, an eco-sensitive zone – a UNESCO biosphere, world’s only wild ass reserve, and a nesting ground of lesser flamingoes – into a huge sweet water lake, called Rann Sarovar, has suffered a major roadblock. At least three Central agencies have expressed serious doubts about its feasibility.

In a surprise revelation, well-known Gujarati journalist Hari Desai has claimed that Nathuram Godse did not just kill Mahatma Gandhi, but also intended to kill Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Citing a voluminous  book  authored by Sadanand More, “Lokmanya to Mahatma”, Volume II, translated from Marathi into English last year, Desai says, nowadays, there is a lot of talk about conspiracy to kill Gandhi, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, and Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, but little is known about how the Sardar was also targeted.

About half of rural women in India eat less than usual during pregnancy, leading to very small weight gain, on an average just about seven kg in the six states surveyed, compared with a norm of 13-18 kg for women with low body mass index (BMI). The worst is Uttar Pradesh, where the weight gain was found to be just four kg, says the Jaccha-Baccha (Mother-Child) Survey 2019, released in Delhi on Monday.

Mahesh Vyas It is surely well-known by now that India's top people in the power-that-be have been castigating all those who disagree with them as "anti-nationals". Nothing unusual. If till yesterday only "secular liberals", and "left-liberals" were declared anti-national, facts, however, appear to have begun surfacing that, now, guns are being trained against those who could be qualified as right liberals, too. Let me be specific.

In what may prove to be a major embarrassment for the Government of India (GoI), a new official survey, carried out in 207-18, has reportedly said that average consumer spending in India fell by more than 4% the previous six years "primarily driven by slackening rural demand." The survey, "Key Indicators: Household Consumer Expenditure in India”, carried out by the National Statistical Office (NSO), says that money spent per person in a month fell by 3.7% from Rs 1,501 in 2011-12 to Rs 1,446 in 2017-18.

A resettlement site A London School of Economics (LSE)-funded study, even as asserting that the Narmada dam oustees resettled in Gujarat are materially better off than their counterparts who have been living in semi-submerged areas and have not been resettled, has admitted existence of poor availability of public health facilities and housing even three or four decades after they began living in the villages with state support.

ASI excavations: Pix by Prof Supriya Varma A top-notch archeologist, Prof Supriya Varma, who served as an observer during the excavation of the Babri Masjid site in early 2000s along with another archeologist, Jaya Menon, has controversially stated that not only was there "no temple under the Babri Masjid”, if one goes “beyond” the 12th century to 4th to 6th century, i.e. the Gupta period, “there seems to be a Buddhist stupa.”

The fair at Vautha In a sharp admission, the Gujarat government has said that most of the industrial units of Ahmedabad, as also the city's residential houses, discharge waste water in Sabarmati, polluting the river. Notably, the river’s 11 kilometre stretch in Ahmedabad, where the riverfront has been beautified, is sought to be projected as a model for the country as a whole.

A New York-based free expression advocacy non-profit, PEN America, has taken strong exception to what it calls “India’s government is retaliating against journalist Aatish Taseer’s reporting critical of the country’s Prime Minister". Taseer has been told by an email from the Consulate General of India in New York that the Government of India had cancelled his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI card) with “effective immediately.”

"India Justice Report" being released in Delhi A Tata Trusts study, released in Delhi on Thursday, has ranked “model” Gujarat 12th out of 18 major states it has analysed across India to “assess” the police's capacity to deliver justice. Several of the advanced states such as Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as well as some of the so-called Bimaru states such as Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are found to have ranked better than Gujarat.

Composite ranking across police, prisons, judiciary and legal aid    Released at a formal ceremony in Delhi, an in-depth study has ranked Gujarat 8th among 18 major states in its “composite ranking” across four different areas it has covered for its analysis – police, prisons, judiciary and legal aid. The states that are found to be performing better than Gujarat in the overall delivery of justice are Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Haryana, Karnataka and Odisha. Analysing three different pillars in order to arrive at a composite ranking for India’s justice delivery system – human resources, diversity, and intention – the study finds that in human resources (manpower, quantity and quality) Gujarat ranks 10th, below Kerala, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab, Rajasthan and Haryana; in diversity (gender representation, for instance) it ranks eighth, below Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, and Uttarakhand;...

  An Indonesia-based international environmental watchdog group has dug out what it has called “a global pollution shell game”, stating how officials in Indonesia approved re-exports of “illegal” US waste shipments containing plastics mainly to India, as also to other Asian countries -- Thailand, South Korea and Vietnam -- instead of returning them to the US “as promised.”

  A  new book , ‘The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company’, authored by well-known Scott historian William Dalrymple, has said that a major reason for the success of the East India Company (EIC), which “colonized” the country between 1600 and 1857, was the support it got from Indian financiers or moneylenders, including Jagat Seth of Calcutta, Gokul Das of Benaras and other “Hindu bankers” of Patna and Allahabad.

  A recent paper, published by the high-profile UK-based NGO Oxfam Great Britain (GB), has revealed that supermarkets and tea brands in India retain more than half (58.2%) of the final consumer price of black processed tea sold in India, with just 7.2% remaining for workers. “For a typically sized pack of branded black tea sold in India priced at Rs 68.8 for 200g, supermarkets and tea brands would retain some Rs 40.4, while workers would collectively receive just Rs 4.95 per pack”, it says.