Bharati being felicitated by Ela Bhatt Founded by Mahatma Gandhi a hundred years ago, Gujarat Vidyapeeth was in news recently for allowing police to enter the campus for the first time ever. The occasion was, some Vidyapeeth students were identified flying objectionable kites on the Makarsankranti day, January 14. The ire was against those who were flying kites printed with anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), anti-National Register of Citizenship (NRC) slogans – a “seditious act” from current standards!

Identifying 703 ongoing land conflicts across India over the last three years, a new Land Conflict Watch (LCW) report has said that these have impacted over 65 lakh people and 21 lakh hectares (ha) of land, with "locked-in investments amounting to over Rs 13.7 lakh crore.

PSS activists Krishnakant and Rohit Prajapati displaying water samples In a major exposure, a joint investigation by an environmental organisation, Paryavaran Surksha Samiti (PSS), and a farmers’ rights organisation, Khedut Ekta Manch (KEM), has revealed that the pollution level of Sabarmati river in Ahmedabad rises by a whopping 46 times – from the chemical oxygen demand (COD) of 4 mg/litre to COD to 184 mg/litre 25 kilomtres after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 11-kilmetre-long high-profile Sabarmati Riverfront ends at Vasna barrage.

Farmers from Aniyali village: Real beneficiaries Claiming to have unearthed a major scam in the distribution of crop insurance funds to Gujarat farmers, a senior farmer rights leader, Sagar Rabari of the Khedut Ekta Manch (KEM), has said that the real beneficiaries are not getting the amount due to them. Instead, he alleged, "non-farmers are benefitting... names are being changed..."

Hurriedly built wall to "hide" poverty  Several prominent academics of Ahmedabad have written an open letter protesting against the construction of the wall near the Indira Bridge in the city in order to “hide the slums from the eyes of the VVIP visitors to Ahmedabad.” The letter, interestingly, does not say that the wall has been constructed in the wake of the proposed visit of US president Donald Trump, allegedly in order to “hide” the sight of poverty during his three-hour visit to the city on February 24.

In a major setback to the fisherfolk of Kutch, Gujarat, who have been claiming that their livelihood has been adversely affected by the Tatas' coal-based ultra mega power plant (UMPP) at Mundra, the US District Court of Columbia has given clean chit to the International Finance Corporation (IFC) on the ground that IFC’s "direct involvement" in the Tata Mundra plant did not occur in the US but in India.

More than a fortnight ago, prominent historian Ramchandra Guha, who calls himself Gandhi scholar and not a Gandhian, came to Ahmedabad. While I was part of a small group of persons who met him at lunch, his lecture on Gandhi in the evening, where he sought to interpret what swaraj meant to Gandhi, surely, interested the selected audience that had been called to listen to him.

A new Amnesty International study, “Troll Patrol India: Exposing Online Abuse Faced by Women Politicians in India”, has found that one in every seven, or 13.8% of tweets, that mentioned women politicians in India were 'problematic' or 'abusive'. Based on a database of over 114,716 tweets mentioning 95 women politicians from India, the study says, a similar database by Amnesty in UK and USA found that 7.1% tweets mentioning politicians were problematic or abusive.

It is called the Golden City of India. The raison d'être is simple: Virtually no houses in the 70,000-odd population of the small township are made of red bricks reinforced with cement. They are all constructed with yellow sandstone found in the nearby hilly tracks. One can go atop any house, not to talk of the hilltop fort, to fathom that it’s all yellow all the way, everywhere, including the beautiful hilltop Jain temples in the fort premises. Jain temples, we were told, aren’t coloured yellow anywhere, except here. Jaisalmer becomes a tourist attraction, starting November and ending mid-March, attracting foreigners and industrialists like Arvind Dubash, who  celebrated  his 50th “destination birthday” here with top Bollywood personalities such as Karan Johar. As part of a small family group, we also visited the city in the third week of January in a Rajasthan trip organized by one of the best known online agencies  MakeMyTrip  – a city about which I vaguely knew a...

Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani does not have an official email id, nor is any register maintained of those meeting him in his office. Revealing this through a Right to Information (RTI) plea which he had filed, Mujahid Nafees, convener, Minority Coordination Committee (MCC), has asked Gujarat chief secretary Anil Mukim set up an email id for the chief minister as also maintain a register of those meeting him.

  Ahead of President Donald Trump's much publicised India visit, which includes a visit to Ahmedabad on February 24, a bipartisan group of American senators have written to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressing concerns and seeking State Department assessments on India's "crackdown" in Kashmir and the controversial citizenship law.

Even as ranking Gujarat eighth among 18 major states -- 12th in police, 9th in prisons, 7th in judiciary and 6th in legal aid – the Gujarat part of the  India Justice Report 2019 , released at a formal function at the Gujarat National Law University (GNLU), Gandhinagar, has said that the state has improved its position on several counts, though it has a long way to go in a few others.

A new study, “Human Cost of Sugar Living and Working Conditions of Migrant Cane-cutters in Maharashtra”, has expressed distress that over a staggering 200,000 children below 14 years of age migrate with their parents every year for sugarcane cutting in the drought-prone Marathwada region, which, ironically, is also a hub of sugarcane industry of India.

While recent reports on the European Union (EU) resolution on the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), quoting EU officials, seek to  suggest  that EU is “keener” on concluding trade and investments agreements with New Delhi than discussing Kashmir and the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a closer look at the draft resolution, proposed to be taken up for discussion in March 2020, appears to point towards something totally different.

Taking strong exception to what it called “insufficient allocation for education”, the Right to Education (RTE) Forum has said, the Union Budget 2020-21 shows “the government’s shrinking responsibility towards school education and implementation of RTE Act 2009.” It added, “Only digitization and online courses do not guarantee quality education, rather it widens the inequality,”.

Taking strong exception to Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani stating during his poll campaign in Delhi on January 30 that Sabarmati river has become clean after the Riverfront Development Project was implemented, senior environmental activist Mahesh Pandya has said it doesn't augur well for him to "lie of the Gandhi martyrs day."