A new book, published by the New York-based Monthly Press Review (MPR), has blamed Microsoft founder Bill Gates for “crowning” the crisis allegedly engulfing India’s health sector, stating, the top American billionaire’s foundation of late has acquired “extraordinary influence" over India’s public health governance,  giving a fillip to a policy that deprives access of public healthcare facilities for majority of the country’s population.

  On November 8, Counterview.in carried an  article  titled “Pump and dump strategy? Erosion of GSFC's Rs 250 crore investment in Canadian firm”, by a 1975 batch IAS bureaucrat, who was called a “turnaround man” by the Times of India way back in 2006. The article is based a letter he wrote to Gujarat chief secretary Anil Mukim protesting against a 2013 Gujarat State Fertilizers and Chemicals investment of Rs 250 crore in Canadian firm Karnalyte in 2013, whose value has now fallen to Rs 10 crore! Based on the article – which argues that the PSU investment was allegedly made without taking into account the Canadian firm’s profile the for production and supply of potash, facing glut in the international market – the “Indian Express” carried a  follow-up  on November 10, even as quoting GSFC CMD Arvind Agrawal as stating he had not seen the letter, as it “is very long”, adding, “It is a seven-year-old matter and there is no point in going in, digging (sic!).” T...

  Bloomberg, a well-known financial, software, data and media company headquartered in Manhattan, New York City, has said that India’s GDP for 2020 would slip to –10.3%, in comparison to three of its immediate neighbours, China 1.9%, Pakistan –0.4, and Bangladesh 3.8%. The GDP comparison comes in a Bloomberg report of 53 countries in its Covid Resilience Ranking.

Ahmed Patel has passed away. It is indeed sad that he became another Covid victim, like thousands of others across the world. His loss appears to have been particularly felt in the Congress corridors. I know how some party leaders from Gujarat would often defend him even if one “negative” remark was made on him. “I personally cannot tolerate any criticism of Ahmedbhai”, Shaktisinh Gohil, Rajya Sabha MP from Gujarat, appointed Bihar in charge ahead of recent assembly polls, told me about a couple of years ago during a tete-e-tete in Ahmedabad.  I have known Ahmedbhai, though not intimately. The first time I met him was in Gandhinagar. It was 1997, when the BJP hadn’t yet taken over. The elections were to take place in December. Just posted as the Times of India reporter to cover government, I was called for a dinner at a very ordinary government-owned flat in Sector 16 where former Congress minister Urvashi Devi who later switched over to BJP, but now is not with any party, used to ...

Inside IAS academy, Mussoori The other day, I was talking to a former colleague of the Times of India, Ahmedabad. I have known him as one of the reasonable and rational journalists. He later served in a TV. When in TV, he would often tell me anecdotes of how they would report events if they failed to reach the spot on time: “We would just say, here the attack took place, and that was the place from where the attackers attacked.”  On phone for a little more than a half an hour, we talked a bit about how the Modi government was seeking to sideline IAS across India, who, I have always believed, despite their constraints (as serve they must the powers-that-be), are broadly wedded to the Constitution of India, something they are groomed for at the IAS academy in Mussourie. While I told him that my interaction with most IAS bureaucrats – which was direct and live till early 2013 when I retired from the Times of India as political editor, Ahmedabad, stationed in Gandhinagar – suggested th...

It was such a pleasure reading a Facebook post. Rajiv Tyagi is former Indian Air Force squadron, His profile describes him as “politically promiscuous anti-fascist dissident, brain defogger, atheist, adventurer, empath, humanist”. This is what says in his post : “Sanskrit for all practical purposes is a dead horse. No amount of flogging will make it pull a political cart any longer.”  It takes me back to the days when I started covering Gujarat Sachivalaya in 1997. It was, I think 1999, if I am not mistaken. Then education minister Anandiben Patel, currently Uttar Pradesh governor and a known Narendra Modi protege, told me, “We don’t need English, we need Sanskrit.” But before recalling all of it, let me first reproduce what Tyagi has to say about Sanskrit: “Even when it was in currency, it was never the language of the people. Sanskrit was like the silly k-language that schoolkids make up within their gang, by adding a k sound before every syllable, to make themselves unintelligib...

Digital bank N26, based in Berlin, known to be offering services to customers to manage their bank account online and from their smartphone in real-time in Europe and USA, has ranked India 76th among 100 countries it has analysed in order to measure female opportunity and achievement around the world in the light on gender equality in business, government and society. In a study, “The Female Opportunity Index 2020/21”, published  online , N26 takes into account several categories to rank the selected 100 countries – including women in government, women in management, women in entrepreneurship, women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), salary level and gender wage gap, equal pay day, female access to education, women's legislation, and maternal leave. Among comparable countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, also known as BRICS, India is ranked the worst. Brazil ranks 38th, followed by Russia 55th, South Africa 62nd and China 74th (one bit better t...

In a surprise move, Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti Urdu Arabi Farsi University at Lucknow has conferred honorary D Litt on RSS leader Indresh Kumar, who was an accused in a 2007 bomb blast incident at the Khawaja Moinuddin Chisti Dargah in Ajmer, and an accused in the murder of another Hindutva worker Sunil Joshi.

  A new book, “Sustainable Development in India: A Comparison with the G-20”, authored by Dr Keshab Chandra Mandal, has regretted that though India’s GDP has doubled over the last one decade, its human development indicators are worse than not just developed countries of the Group of 20 countries but also developing countries who its members.

NGO campaign against witchcraft in Dahod  In a gruesome incident, a migrant tribal woman worker has been allegedly set on fire after being suspected of being a witchcraft in Virnagar village, Jasdan taluka, of Rajkot district, Gujarat. The incident took place on November 18, when the three men and a woman tried to kill the victim in front of her husband under the suspicion that she was practising witchcraft.

Mahurkar at GMC meet On November 18 evening, the Gujarat Media Club (GMC) organised a felicitation function for Uday Mahurkar, a long-time journalist with “India Today”, as the new information commissioner of the Central Information Commission, the Right to Information (RTI) watchdog of the Government of India. There were two reasons why I decided avoiding the meed (I conveyed it on WhatsApp that I wouldn’t attending).  The first was, of course, the pandemic, though GMC claimed it would do everything to ensure that “enough precautions” would be taken. And the second was, I have found myself a misfit in such ceremonies – I get bored, often lost, sit among the back benches, talking around with those sitting next by me. Surely, it was different when I had to attend some of such ceremonial functions in Gandhinagar as part of my duty as the Times of India reporter. Yet, I decided to watch the function on Facebook live – a link was sent by GMC on WhatsApp. What surprised me was, a maximu...

As many as 23 members of the Hindu Voices for Peace (HVP), including the founder president of the well-known Haridwar-based Matri Sadan Ashram, Swami Shivananda Saraswati, and a one of its top monks, Brahmachari Aatmabodhanand, have expressed their “dismay” over the arrest of Khudai Khidmatdar chief Faisal Khan and three others on charges of “promoting enmity between religions” and “defiling a place of worship” after they offered namaz in Mathura’s Nand Baba temple premises on October 29.

A top conservation and environment news features service has warned that a large scale shift to electric vehicles (EV) “may not be as environment friendly as it seems”, pointing towards “concerns” over lack of solid plan for “this shift and in absence of a plan for integrating renewables to power.”

Welcoming the  modified  National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) advisory titled “Human Rights Advisory on Rights of Women in the Context of Covid19”, feminist and women’s rights collectives and organizations have lauded NHRC for “proactively taking on board the diverse and even contradictory view points that emerged in response to the specific sections related to sex workers.”

Finn's Weaver  The Government of India has been pushing out “misleading” data on the country’s drastic wildlife decline, says a well-researched report, pointing towards how top ministers are hiding data on biodiversity losses, even as obfuscating its own data. It quotes “State of India’s Birds Report 2020” to note that of the 261 out of 867 bird species for which long-term trends could be determined, 52% have declined since the year 2000, with 22% declining strongly.

Gujarat’s civil rights organization, Minority Coordination Committee (MCC), has regretted that the state government has refused to observe November 11 as the National Education Day, celebrated every year in the memory of India’s first education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s contribution in the field of education.

Dushyant Dave, SA Bobde  Did Supreme Court chief justice SA Bobde ignore a suggestion to allow Reliance Jio as “better platform” for virtual hearings during the pandemic? It would seem so, if the controversial  letter , authored by Dushyant Dave, president, Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA), to the apex court secretary-general protesting against what he calls “extraordinary urgency” in listing the special leave petition filed on behalf of Republic TV editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami is any guide.

I am a little confused. How does one describe the arrest of Republic TV anchor Arnab Goswami? Most top newspapers, even as stating that they disagree with Arnab’s style of “journalism”, have condemned it, and so has the Editors’ Guild, which is headed by Seema Mustafa, founder of left-of-centre site thecitizen.in. A Republic TV insider suggested me, refusing to directly defend Arnab, that it all started with “clash of ego” between Arnab and the Mumbai Police Commissioner.  No doubt, Arnab’s way of interpreting things – whether it was the arrest of journalists across India, or of activists allegedly involved in the Bhima Koregaon violence, or for that matter of students and ex-students, even women, participating in the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) movement – were highly objectionable. It appeared to me, as did to many other journalists, that he was defending the authoritarian hand of the government. Arnab even took the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and Central Bureau o...

Gandhian social activist Faisal Khan, who claims to have revived the historic Khudai Khidmatgar, an organization established by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also known as Frontier Gandhi, during the hedays of the freedom movement, has been arrested in Delhi four days after he offered namaz at the Nand Baba temple in Mathura. The arrest took place close on the heels an Uttar Pradesh cabinet minister Shrikant Sharma, criticising Khan and his team, said, “Legal action will be taken against the culprits who are trying to create disharmony in the society.”

Last month-end, a Dalit poet, Jayesh Jeeviben Solanki, passed away. I learned this from Facebook. Innumerable FB friends, including Gujarat’s topmost Dalit rights politician Jignesh Mevani, who won as an independent MLA with Congress support, paid glowing tributes to Jayesh. Young, perhaps in his 30s, the very name suggests that he wanted to proclaim himself to be: that he is not a patriarch. The middle name is Jeeviben, which, I think, should be his mother’s (he wasn’t married) – unusual, as in Gujarat’s patriarchal tradition, it’s a tradition to put father’s name in the middle. 

A women’s collective of Delhi’s Dwarka area, Dwarka Eksath, has held an awareness event and a march to protest against recent incidents of sexual harassment in the elite urban locality despite the police refusing to give the events a permission. It was amidst wide apprehensions that the authorities have refused to act effectively despite complaints made to them.

Over 140 Indians, including activists, academics, writers, artistes, journalists and corporates, condemning the recent Paris beheadings, even as deploring the “outrageous statements” by Muslim religious and political leaders, have insisted, “No God, gods, goddesses, prophets or saints may be invoked to justify the killing and/or terrorising of fellow human beings”, adding, they “reject any ifs and buts in the justification of heinous crimes in the name of religion.”

A virtual discussion organised by a high-profile NGO, Toxics Link, taking strong exception to the refusal of the Government of India to ratify international ban on transboundary trade in hazardous waste, has said that the refusal to ratify the ban has come about despite the fact that “India took a significant decision of putting an import ban on plastic waste”, in what has come to be known as Basel Ban Amendment, adopted in 1995, and come into force last year, on December 5, 2019.