Counterview

By Rajiv Shah In a major admission, the Gujarat government has said that government pleaders are so preoccupied with their jobs that they are “unable to address” and give “enough time” to fight cases related with Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. A government resolution (GR) issued by the state’s social justice and empowerment department with the specific intention of raising the conviction rate of atrocities cases has said that in the recent past the state government has witnessed a sharp fall in the ability to take up atrocity cases.

By Venkatesh Nayak * A preliminary analysis of the RTI amendment Bill tabled in Parliament on Monday suggests several things. At first glance the amendment Bill only seeks to exclude political parties from the purview of the RTI Act and will have retrospective effect if enacted in this form. So it effectively nullifies the CIC's order of June 2013 declaring six political parties as public authorities. Clearly, the amendment Bill violates the right to equality and equal treatment to all persons guaranteed by the Constitution under Article 14.

By Rajiv Shah  One of most naïve arguments on rural areas, including those of Gujarat, has been regarding their homogeneous characteristic — the existence of “harmonious” social relations in which “self-sufficient” village communities live in a peaceful atmosphere. Based on this type of thinking, the Gujarat chief minister began his now famous “samras” experiment, under which village panchayats elected uncontested should be rewarded. However, sociologists have long demonstrated that in areas of strong homogeneity, there is a general tendency to repress controversy. As a result, when disagreements arise, they can result into serious crises. Well-known human rights organization Navsarjan Trust’s documentary evidence, collected from several villages of Gujarat, recorded in several of its reports (click HERE to see them) has long suggested how such homogeneity in a caste-ridden society is a sham. Despite efforts by Dalit NGOs to fight discrimination against Dalits, as evidenced during...

By Ashok Shrimali* The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006 (FRA 2006 in short) was passed by the Indian Parliament in December 2006. This is the first time in the history of the post independent India that a Government (the UPA Government) brought in a forest related legislation to recognize and vest the forest rights and occupation in forest land in forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have been residing in such forests for generations but whose rights were not recorded.

Pankti Jog By A Representative A huge scam is suspected to be taking shape in Gujarat -- the scam to build toilets on paper. The first signs of the scam were visible in a small village in Jamnagar district, Nandana, situated in Kalyanapur taluka. "Things would have never come to light had a casual worker not filed a right to information (RTI) application in order to find out how many persons of the village had applied for grants to build individual toilets in their houses and how many of them were approved by the District Rural Development Agency (DRDA) under Government of India's total sanitation programme", said senior activist Pankti Jog of the Mahiti Adhikar Gujarat Pahel (MAGP), a state-based RTI NGO.

By Rajiv Shah  The Gujarat government is planning a huge mela of village panchayat leaders from all over the country in Gandhinagar on August 17, 2013. Last year, it was a state-level function, where awards were distributed to those village panchayats which elected their bodies and sarpanches without contest, thus becoming “samras” panchayats. However, facts collected by Navsarjan Trust, Ahmedabad-based human rights organization, suggest that caste dynamics in villages are so strong that such “samras” show has little or no meaning. Latest information collected by the NGO suggest that the Gujarat ruling establishment’s all-out efforts to “encourage” homogeneity in the state’s rural areas by having as many “samras” village panchayats without elections as possible are already coming to a naught. Documentary evidence collected on the basis of field reports show that at a large number of places, the upper castes are not only refusing to give up their hegemony, but are doing all they ca...

Navsarjan report By Rajiv Shah In a complete about-turn, the Gujarat government has asserted that it never asked the CEPT University to review or refute an NGO study by Navsarjan Trust on wide prevalence of untouchability in Gujarat's rural areas. The NGO study titled "Understanding Untouchability", carried out in 2010, was based on a survey of about 1,600 villages. The statement is in total contrast to what the introduction to the CEPT report says -- that the state government had sponsored it in order to "review" the NGO study and find out if there was such wide prevalence of untouchability as the study claims. It is not known what has prompted the state government to make a change in its stance.

Dilapidated building of a village school in Kutch district By Rajiv Shah  The National Commission for Protection Child Rights (NCPCR) in a new report has suggested that wide regional imbalances exist in the provision of education in Gujarat. Prepared as minutes on the basis of an NCPCR team’s field visit to Kutch’s Khavda region, Rajkot, Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, the report says that development in some of the pockets of Kutch district has failed to touch the people of the region. Especially referring to the schools situated in the remote Khavda taluka, where the NCPCR team spent some time inspecting village schools on July 24, the report says, “The taluka is 70 kilometre from Bhuj, the district headquarters. And some of the villages we visited were another 50 kilomtres away. Indeed, it is possible to say that development of the region is 120 kilometres away from the mainstream.” The NCPCR team visit took place following a study of 506 government primary schools in Kutch, Ahmedaba...

By A Representative Even as declaring that he is unwilling to take charge as Gujarat Lokayukta, in a strongly worded letter to Gujarat governor Dr Kamla and Gujarat High Court chief justice Baskar Bhattacharya, Justice RA Mehta (retired) has declared that he is doing so because the Gujarat government has gone of the way to “denigrated” the high office. Justice Mehta’s appointment, which went controversial after Dr Kamla took a suo motu decision to appoint him as Lokayukta following the Gujarat chief minister’s reluctance, was cleared by the Supreme Court recently. The apex court dismissed the BJP government's curative petition against Lokayukta appointment in July third week.

By Rajiv Shah  A recent study suggests that healthcare facilities in Gujarat’s urban slums, as in the rest of India, are worse than those the rural areas. Though the study is confined to one of Gujarat’s richest districts, Anand, which has lately considerable urbanization, it is indicative of the fact that there is a complete failure on the part of the officialdom to provide basic healthcare facilities to the deprived sections of population, who come from the rural areas and settle down in slums in the hope of eking out a better livelihood. Titled “Urban slums in Gujarat Newborn Care Practices and Health Seeking Behavior in Urban Slums and Villages of Anand, Gujarat”, the study was jointly carried out by Archana S Nimbarkar and Vivek V Shukla from the Department of Pediatrics, Pramukhswami Medical College, Karamsad, and Ajay G Pathak and Somashekhar M Nimbalkar from the Central Research Services, Charutar Arogya Mandal, Karamsad, Anand district. A major conclusion of the study is t...