Counterview

By A Representative The tenth biennial conference of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), an apex body of several grassroots organisations and NGOs spread all over the country, has called for “united action” in the face of “neoliberal onslaughts”. Held against the backdrop of continued political advance of the Narendra Modi-led BJP, which is seeking to amend “positive features” of the new land acquisition Act, water down environmental and forest rights laws and the rural jobs scheme, participants at the NAPM meeting said it is the “need of the hour” to come “together to challenge the neoliberal communal onslaught.”

By Rohit Prajapati, Trupti Shah We activists of Gujarat oppose and condemn the construction of ‘Statue of Unity’; because it will be a statue that will divide and remove the tribal people form their land, forest and livelihood. It is a structure that will be 182 meters (392 feet) tall of Sardar Patel planned near the Sardar Sarovar Dam by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The statue will be placed directly facing the Sardar Sarovar dam at a distance of 3.2 km at the Sadhu Bet. Surprisingly and shockingly, the Government of Gujarat has allocated Rs 500 crore in the 2014-15 budget and the Government of India also has allocated Rs 200 crore in the 2014-2015 budget for the Statue of Unity project by presuming that project does not requires environment clearance from the concerned authorities. More recently, the Government of Gujarat issued a work order of Rs. 2,979 crore to Larsen and Toubro for the construction of the Statue of Unity. The Government of Gujarat website states, “A monument, tha...

By A Representative D Jagatheesa Pandian, additional chief secretary, industries, has been chosen by Gujarat government to take over as new state chief secretary, setting aside the claim of No 2 in the bureaucracy, Sudip Kumar Nanda. Belonging to the 1981 IAS batch, Pandian will take over as chief secretary on November 1, 2014. Officials said, Nanda’s Congress past played a major role for dropping him. Currently additional chief secretary, home, Nanda has been sent to head the Gujarat State Fertilizers Corporation (GSFC), a state public sector undertaking (PSU) in Vadodara. More recently, during Navratri, Nanda overturned Vishwa Hindu Parishad move not to allow Muslims to enter garba venues. He barred use of identity cards to take part in garbas.

By A Representative Two senior Gujarat-based environmental activists, Rohit Prajapati and Trupti Shah, have asked the Government of Gujarat to submit an application for environment clearance to the concerned authorities before kickstarting the construction of 182 metres high -- tallest in the world -- statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, planned about 3.2 km downstream of the Narmada dam. Asking the state government to immediately stop the construction, and suspend all activities related to it, they said, the proposed decision to go ahead with the project is “illegal”, and against the spirit of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) notification of September 2006, as also and the Environment Protection Act, 1986.

By A Representative Top Right to Information (RTI) activist Venkatesh Nayak has alleged that Government of India’s Double Tax Avoidance Agreements (DTAAs) with foreign countries “curb” independence of judiciary, undermine laws made by Parliament, and curtail the scope of the people’s right to know under the pretext of protecting the privacy of high net worth individuals (HNIs), firms and corporations who may be tax evaders. Objecting to the secrecy clause signed with over 100 countries since 1965, involving governments of all dispensations, Nayak said, the fact is, none of the DTAAs were ever ratified in Parliament.

By A Representative Thirty-eight prominent citizens have asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to withhold the decision to raise the height of the Narmada dam further by erecting 17 metres high gates, to the full reservoir level, i.e. 138.68 meters, saying this will affect “44 additional village communities and one whole township”, and stretching up to “214 km long area in the Narmada basin.” Asking him to do this in the name of “a new democratic initiative, respect law, democracy, human values and human rights”, the letter warned, in case the height is raised, “45,000 families will be displaced.”

By Rajiv Shah  A new National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO’s) report, “Participation of Women in Specified Activities along with Domestic Duties”, finalized in September 2014, has revealed that a higher percentage of Gujarat women are driven by the conservative socio-religious framework of their families and society compared to most Indian states. Based on the survey it carried out between July 2011 and June 2012, the NSSO report has found that, in the 15+ age, 91.9 per cent of Gujarat’s rural and 94.4 per cent of urban women spend most of the time in domestic duties, which is around the same as the national average of 91.7 and 92.2 per cent, respectively. However, this does not tell the full story. Of these women identified as being involved domestic duty full time in Gujarat, 54.8 per cent in rural areas and 62.5 per cent in urban areas said they were doing it because there is no other member to carry out the domestic duties. And – and this is worrisome – 18.7 per cent of ru...

By A Representative Sharply criticizing “successive Indian governments” for failing to prosecute those most responsible for killings and other abuses during the 1984 anti-Sikh violence, influential human rights body, Human Rights Watch (HRW), has asked the Narendra Modi government should “enact a law against communal violence that would hold public officials accountable for complicity and dereliction of duty.” Saying that independent civil society inquiries have found “complicity” by both police and leaders of the Congress, HRW underlined, “Three decades later, only 30 people, mostly low-ranking Congress supporters, have been convicted for the attacks that resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries.”

Counterview News      The latest National Sample Survey (NSS) report, “Informal Sector and Conditions of Employment in India”, finalized in July 2014, and based on survey between July 2011 and June 2012, has gone a long way to suggest extremely sorry state of affairs of workers in Gujarat, especially in what has been called the non-agricultural sector, as also in the sector identified AGEGC ([ag]riculture sector [e]xcluding [g]rowing of [c]rops). Seeking to analyze the status of affairs of workers with a special focus on the informal sector — in which 72.4 per cent of the total workers employed in the non-agricultural and AGEGC units are employed in India – the data show that the situation is particularly appalling in Gujarat, where 75.1 per cent belong to the informal sector out of the total workforce employed in the non-agricultural and AGEGC units. The NSS report finds that not only average wages (casual and salaries combined) being paid in Gujarat – Rs 268 per day, as...

Click on the image to watch full interview on YouTube  By A Representative India’s main Left party, Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M), may have noted that in the new dispensation under Prime Minister Narendra Modi the neglect of India’s poor has intensified, as seen in the “targeted attack” on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), implemented by the previous Congress-led government. This is being "effected" by putting "a cut on the budgetary outlays", it says. However, the party does not think this is reason enough to drop its earlier stance of maintaining equi-distance between the Congress and Modi-led BJP, which snatched power by decimating the Congress in the May 2014 Lok Sabha elections.