In a controversial assertion, top legal expert Upendra Baxi has sought to question India's Constitution makers for neglecting human rights and social justice. Addressing an elite audience in Ahmedabad, Prof Baxi said, the constitutional idea of India enunciated by the Constituent Assembly tried to resolve four key conflicting concepts: governance, development, rights and justice.

In a symbolic protest against PepsiCo, which had filed a case against Gujarat farmers for “illegally” using sowing the potato variety FL-2027 the company claims to have developed and hence has intellectual property right (IPR) over it, the affected farmers and their leaders took up the variety’s symbolic sowing at a press conference in Ahmedabad.

  A well-attended Dalit rights meet under the banner “14 Pe Charcha” (discussion on Article 14 of the Indian Constitution), alluding to Prime Minister Narendra Modi well-known campaign phrase of the 2014 Parliamentary elections, “chai pe charcha” (discussion over cup of tea), organized off Ahmedabad, has resolved on Wednesday to hold a 14 kilometres-long rally on April 14 to oppose the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), enacted on December 10-11.

Rohit Prajapati The Vadodara-based environmental NGO Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (PSS) in a letter to the secretary, Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Government of India, with copy to the official's counterparts in Gujarat, has said that the sewage treatment plants (STPs) across Gujarat are a "prime source of pollution" of the state's rivers, and the authorities are not serious about remedying the situation.

Satish Sinha's rejoinder to my story “Nirma told to publicly declare it's 'not using' carcinogenic chemical in detergents” : This is to draw your attention on the  news story , “Nirma told to publicly declare it's 'not using' carcinogenic chemical in detergents”, by Rajiv Shah. We would like to assert that the report is factually incorrect and misrepresents facts. The author has incorrectly attributed quotes that were never mentioned and some have been incorrectly contextualized. We completely disagree with the text and find the reporting misleading.

A poster at Sabarmati Ashram for rally in support of CAA Taking strong objection to the Government of Gujarat permitting an organization called Citizens’ Committee to hold a rally in support of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), an Ahmedabad-based civil rights activist in a letter to chief minister Vijay Rupani has wondered why rallies to protest against CAA, which allegedly violates Articles 5, 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution of India, are not being allowed.

An influential Delhi NGO has told the powerful Gujarat-based industrial house Nirma that it should come up with a public statement stating it is not using nonylphenol, a “disrupting chemical” commonly used to manufacture detergents, which the NGO claims is “a persistent, toxic, bioaccumulative chemical” that acts as a “hormone disruptor” and can be responsible for a number of "adverse human health effects”, including cancer.

  In a hard-hitting editorial titled "Modi makes his bigotry even clearer" in the wake of the new citizenship law, which "helps non-Muslim refugees from Muslim-majority countries but ignores Muslim refugees from other nations", "The New York Times" has  said  that it is "the first action" that links "religion to citizenship, undermining a fundamental tenet of India’s democracy."

Abhijit Banerjee Even as suggesting a series of measures to push out the Indian economy from the current “great slowdown”, well-known economist Arvind Subramanian has advised the Government of India (GoI) to urgently set up a committee under the leadership of Nobel Prize winner Professor Abhijit Banerjee in order to trigger the process of “generating and disseminating accurate data.”

A few days back, when I met Prof Krishna Kumar in Ahmedabad, a prominent scholar on education, whom I have considered over the last two decades more as the main brain behind Prof Yash Pal’s well-known report "Learning without Burden" (1993), I just couldn’t resist recalling my interactions with him as a BA (honours) English student in Kirori Mal College in Delhi. Prof Kumar was in Ahmedabad to deliver a lecture on why our education system was failing to succeed. It was an Umashakar Joshi memorial lecture. All that I knew of Umashankar Joshi was, he was a prominent Gujarati poet and that he was vice chancellor of the Gujarat University, but had a very vague idea that he was also a keen observer of education, too. Before Prof Kumar began his address, Svati Joshi, who had organized the lecture, told the Ahmedabad Management Association audience, that as a budding poet, during his youth, Umashankar Joshi organized protests in the city against making higher education the exclusive...

Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took over power in 2014 at the Centre, more than 80 have been killed “in their quest for information and accountability” through the Right to Information (RTI) Act, a public hearing in Delhi has been told. Senior politicians from opposition parties, including Congress and Left, heard people express their anguish over the manner in which the government was treating the RTI Act, even as refusing to operationalise the Whistleblower Protection Act, passed in 2014.

CRI: Climate Risk Index A top development and environmental organization, based in Bonn, Germany, has raised the alarm that India is the fifth “most affected”, following Japan, the Philippines, Germany and Madagascar, by damage as a result of heatwaves. Pointing out that India, along with nine other countries suffered from “extended periods of heat” in 2018, the body, German Watch, insists, there is “a clear link between climate change and the frequency and severity of extreme heat.”

The prestigious American Historical Association (AHA) has taken strong exception to the Jahawarlal Nehru University (JNU) seeking Prof Romila Thapar’s curriculum vitae (CV) in order to “review” her status as professor emeritus. John R. McNeill, president, AHA, has written to JNU vice chancellor Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar and said it is meant to “discourage" the university's review of Romila Thapar's status as emeritus professor.

  A Government of India report, released last month, has suggested that “model” Gujarat has failed to make any progress vis-à-vis other states in ensuring that girls continue to remain enrolled after they leave primary schools. The report finds that, in the age group 14-17, Gujarat’s 71% girls are enrolled at the secondary and higher secondary level, which is worse than 20 out of 22 major states for which data have been made available. 

A recent report, published a top American think-tank based in Washington DC, the Pew Research Center, has found India faring poorest among the 25 most populous countries across the world in social hostilities index (SHI), which seeks to analyse 13 different issues related with social tensions arising out of religious discord and violence.

In a surprising move, the newly-created Union territory of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), despite having lost its special status, and the Government of India (GoI) claim that its citizens have "equal rights" as those enjoyed by others in the country, has begun a parallel process of examining the Central Right to Information (RTI) Act's applicability to the UT.

This is in continuation of my previous  blog  where I had quoted from a commentary which top economist Prof Kaushik Basu had written in the New York Times (NYT) a little less than a month ago, on November 6, to be exact. He recalled this article through a tweet on November 29, soon after it was made known that India's growth rate had slumped (officially!) to 4.5%.