Solar power plant under construction in Nagaon district An environmental activists’ fact-finding team led by Prafulla Samantara, recipient of Goldman Prize, also known as Green Nobel, has alleged that the process of acquiring the land in for a 15 MW solar power plant in Assam is mired in several “illegalities and violations of policies, laws and regulations” from the nature of land appropriation, to dispossession of people.

The second edition of the India Justice Report (IJR), a  study  undertaken jointly by Tata Trusts in collaboration with several advocacy groups, has said that five non-BJP-ruled states – Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Punjab and Kerala – are the top performers compared those ruled by BJP, including “model” Gujarat, which ranks No 6th in a ranking of 18 large states for the delivery of justice to people.

In India, nearly 40% girls remain out of school in the age-group of 15-18 years, a new  policy brief , prepared by the Right to Education (RTE) Forum, an education rights network, has said. The policy brief has been released to mark the International Day of Education and National Girl Child Day, falling on January 24.

  A United Nations human rights official has called upon the Government of India (GoI) to “immediately release" 16 human rights defenders who have been imprisoned on charges of terrorism in the Bhima-Koregaon Case, insisting, “These people should not be in jail. They are our modern-day heroes and we should all be looking to them and supporting them and demanding their release.”  

The Nidhi Razdan episode, which I learned from the blog she wrote on the NDTV site, has created a flutter among journalists, whether in New Delhi or in Ahmedabad. I talked with half-a-dozen senior journalists, three of whom said they knew her personally and were "surprised" how and why she was a victim of what she claimed to be a phishing attack, which led her to believe that she had been enrolled in as associate professor to reach journalism at the Harvard Extension School in US. While the blog is self-explanatory about all that had happened – the former NDTV executive editor frankly calls herself an “idiot” and “stupid” for failing to realise till January 2021 about the fraud being played on her ever since May 2019, when she had gone to Harvard – the journalists whom I talked to wondered: How could she fail to perform the basic duty of a journalist, especially a reporter, which Razdan was, to counter-check every detail? The view was strong among those whom I talked with, t...

The controversy surrounding the two vaccines appears to be taking a scary turn. It so happened that I was talking to a senior healthcare expert of Gujarat on January 17. A very kind soul, this expert, whom I have known since 1990s, took the vaccine and posted the exercise on the Facebook so that others should know it's "safe". I contacted him on Facebook messenger, congratulated his gesture, and asked him which one was it. He said, "Covishield. This is the only one in Gujarat." Covishield is the name the vaccine developed by Oxford, UK, and it is being produced in the Serum Institute in Pune. It has completed all the three phases of trials. The third and final phase, which took place after enrolling around 36,000 people, I presume, in Brazil and South Africa. In sharp contrast, the other vaccine, Covaxin, a Bharat Biotech product, hasn't yet completed its third trial, yet it has been "approved" by the Government of India. The health expert telling ...

London protest for release of Stan Swamy  Will Father Stan Swamy’s arrest, especially the fact that he is a Christian and a priest, turn out to be major international embarrassment for the Government of India? It may well happen, if a recent debate on a resolution titled “India: Persecution of Minority Groups” in the United Kingdom (UK) Parliament is any indication. While Jesuits have protested Fr Stan's arrest in UK and US, the resolution, adopted in the Parliament, said, “This House has considered the matter of persecution of Muslims, Christians and minority groups in India”.

  A recent  study , jointly carried out by the UN World Food Programme and the International Organization for Migration, seeking to explore the impact of Covid-19 and lockdown measures on migrant workers, remittance-dependent households and the forcibly displaced, has identified India as one of the major countries where Covid-19 has “exacerbated pre-existing grievances, stigmas and community divisions, resulting in increased discrimination against mobile and displaced population perceived as disease carriers.”

  On December 25, 2020 Prime Minister of India,  speaking  on the occasion of the birthday of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, said, the Central government had deposited Rs 18,000 crore in the bank accounts of more than 9 crore farmer households under the PM-Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana ( PM-Kisan  Yojana).

Recently, I did a story on a Gujarat NGO report by Buniyad, which said it had noticed a new trend: Especially since 2014, communal violence, it insisted, spread to new rural areas. While I did cover Gujarat riots of 2002, I must admit, as I was based in Gandhinagar, and my main job was to cover the state government, I did fewer spot stories compared many of my journalist colleagues of the “Times of India” and “Indian Express” based in Ahmedabad, who did surely an excellent job. It’s another things, though, that the stories of these colleagues, who covered Gujarat riots in 2002 on a day-to-day basis, covering every bit of it, are rarely remembered. Those who are based in big metropolitan centres Delhi or Mumbai are quoted more often, even if they would have made flying visits during the riots. A few of them even wrote books, as posing themselves as know-all. Some even tried “digging out” known facts posing as undercover agents! Be that as it may, what the Buniyad report tries to observ...

The Central Information Commission (CIC) has ruled that information cannot be denied if citizenship proof is not given along with the Right to Information (RTI) application. In a recent order, information commissioner Vanaja N Sarna quoted the RTI Act’s Section Section 3 of the Act which reads, “Subject to the provisions of this Act, all citizens shall have the right to information.”