Counterview

Counterview News  The latest update to Equality Now's flagship Words & Deeds report reveals that women's and girls' rights globally are facing a "strategic and coordinated rollback," with hard-won legal protections being weakened or deliberately undermined, though the report stresses this backlash is neither inevitable nor irreversible .

Counterview News   Persistent caste discrimination , the marginalisation of Dalits , concerns over the rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples , and the treatment of religious and ethnic minorities are among the issues flagged by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in its latest observations on India.

By Rajiv Shah The other day, I was talking with a non-resident Indian (NRI) in a middle-level city off the eastern coast of the United States. The tête-à-tête took place as we were returning from a religious ceremony at a well-established Hindu temple, where several hundred NRIs had participated, many of them actively.

Counterview News   The Earth is approaching a series of irreversible environmental thresholds that threaten the stability of life on the planet, but a landmark new study argues that the same systems science that predicts catastrophe also offers a blueprint for rapid, self-propelling recovery. 

By Rajiv Shah   Following my blog on why the Eiffel Tower authorities should take all the blame for giving in to the Swaminarayan sadhus ’ bizarre demand to “invisibilise” women, including its female staff, during their visit to the internationally renowned Paris tourist centre on September 5, an interesting comment by one of the top academics drew my attention to something I vaguely knew about one of India’s most powerful and richest religious sects.

Counterview News   A new academic study has drawn fresh attention to Sankalp Bhoomi, a modest memorial site in Vadodara's Sayaji Baug, arguing that the spot where B.R. Ambedkar spent five difficult hours in 1917 has quietly grown into one of Gujarat's most significant sites of Dalit political and cultural assertion.

Counterview News   A scathing independent citizens' inquiry has concluded that the Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada river, one of India's most ambitious multipurpose dams, has systematically violated the legal and human rights of tens of thousands of displaced families while overstating its economic benefits and understating its ecological costs.

Counterview News   In a detailed interview published by The Examination on September 10, 2026, food policy expert Marion Nestle discusses her new book Sugar Coated (co-authored with Lisa Sutherland, a former Kellogg vice president of nutrition). The book traces how cereal makers transformed a niche product into a breakfast staple through marketing, industry-funded research, lobbying, and regulatory outmaneuvering.

Counterview News   The devastating flood that swept through Nepal 's Rasuwa district on August 26, 2026, was likely triggered by climate change , but the scale of the tragedy was determined by human decisions — including the unchecked proliferation of hydropower projects in a fragile Himalayan landscape, according to Himanshu Thakkar , coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP).

Counterview News   On the eve of the 18th BRICS Summit, a new report has accused the New Development Bank (NDB) — the multilateral lender set up by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — of failing to deliver on its founding promise of people-centric, sustainable development, even as the harms from its projects mount and affected communities are left with no way to seek redress.

Counterview News  A citizens’ audit of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Y Block, Mangolpuri, has challenged the Delhi Chief Electoral Officer’s defence of deletions from the draft electoral roll, alleging that in four of six cited cases the official explanation rests on “an unrecorded, unnamed ‘local inquiry’ or oral statement” rather than documented evidence. The detailed response follows a four-hour public hearing on 5 September 2026 before a citizens’ jury chaired by Justice (Retd.) Madan B. Lokur, former Judge of the Supreme Court of India.

By Rajiv Shah   I was a little surprised to see how some of those whom I respect for taking a firm stand on patriarchal issues reacted to the manner in which they responded to the recent incident in Paris, in which women employees of the Eiffel Tower were asked to remain "invisible" on September 5 when 100 BAPS sadhus visited one of the world's top tourist destinations.

Counterview News   The National Highways Authority of India on Tuesday announced that highway projects will no longer receive their Provisional Certificate of Completion (PCC) or Provisional Commercial Operation Date (PCOD) unless at least 80% of the right-of-way earmarked for plantation is covered and saplings show a 90% survival rate at inspection. Operations and maintenance payments across EPC, HAM and BOT-Annuity projects will also be withheld if survival drops below 90%.

By Rajiv Shah  A new study has ranked Ahmedabad as the least climate-resilient major city in the world , highlighting a dangerous gap between the city’s extreme physical vulnerability to climate hazards and its capacity to adapt. Cited by The New York Times , the analysis, conducted by geospatial artificial intelligence firm AlphaGeo , places the Indian city at the top of a list of global urban centres most exposed to climate risk.

By Rajiv Shah   One day after Janmashtami , to be exact, on September 5, during my stay in the US, I was taken to two separate celebrations in a town on the East Coast, ostensibly to keep me engaged among NRIs . While one of them had, apart from the ritualistic puja at a temple in the name of Radhe Krishna , located around a small pond on the outskirts, dance and song performances, it was the second one that interested me the most.

Counterview News   For generations, the seasonal Anjani River has been more than a waterway for the Patharvat community of Waghlud Khurd. It has been their classroom, their workplace, their temple, and their source of life. But today, the riverbed that once rang with the sound of hammers and chisels has fallen quiet. A centuries-old stone craft is dying—not because the river has changed, but because the world around it has, says a  guest blog published in the website of the advocacy group SANDRP (South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People).

Counterview News   A people-led audit of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Mangolpuri’s Y-Block has brought renewed scrutiny to the accuracy of Delhi’s draft electoral rolls, with citizen volunteers and civil-society groups reporting cases in which voters allegedly found themselves wrongly classified as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate, or missing altogether from the draft list.

Counterview News   The environmental advocacy group South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) has published a hard-hitting analysis of Pune's ongoing River Front Development (RFD) project , framing its concerns around fundamental questions that challenge the project's technical, ecological, and legal foundations.

Counterview News   A bombshell study by the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA) has revealed that Delhi's four Waste-to-Energy (WTE) incineration plants score a staggering 100 out of 100 on the Central Pollution Control Board's (CPCB) own Pollution Index — making them more toxic than coal-fired power plants, open-cast coal mining, and copper smelters — yet the regulator quietly moved them into a newly created "Blue" category last year that strips away critical environmental safeguards.

Counterview News   A devastating catastrophe across the Himalayas has prompted river and dam advocacy group South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) to publish a scathing assessment of regional infrastructure planning, warning that planners and governments are committing fatal errors by treating Himalayan flood disasters merely as extreme water surges rather than catastrophic debris events .