Counterview

By  A  Representative About half of rural women in India eat less than usual during pregnancy, leading to very small weight gain, on an average just about seven kg in the six states surveyed, compared with a norm of 13-18 kg for women with low body mass index (BMI). The worst is Uttar Pradesh, where the weight gain was found to be just four kg, says the Jaccha-Baccha (Mother-Child) Survey 2019, released in Delhi on Monday.

By RB Sreekumar, IPS (Retd)* The Supreme Court last week, by 3:2 majority, decided to keep the review petitions in Sabarimala matter pending until a larger bench determines questions related to essential religious practices. The majority of CJI Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Khanwilkar and Indu Malhotra expressed that the issue whether Court can interfere in essential practises of religion needed examination by larger bench. Justices Chandrachud and Nariman dissented.

By  A  Representative Around 1,500 people displaced and affected by the backwaters of Sardar Sarovar Dam have reached Bhopal and begun an indefinite protest, demanding adequate compensation and rehabilitation, in front of the Narmada Valley Development Authority’s (NVDA’s) office. The protestors included people from different districts of Madhya Pradesh, including Barwani, Dhar, Khargone and Alirajpur. Their satyagraha is led by Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) leader Medha Patkar, who has been fighting for the last 34 years, first against the construction of the dam and now for the dam’s operations to comply fully with the Supreme Court orders, the Narmada Water Dispute Tribunal award of 1979 and the state government’s rehabilitation policy. “We have been forced to come to Bhopal as there has been a violent attack on our Narmada Valley carried out by the callousness of Gujarat and central government,” Patkar said. “We have come to ask questions related to the human rights and liv...

Mahesh Vyas By Rajiv Shah  It is surely well-known by now that India's top people in the power-that-be have been castigating all those who disagree with them as "anti-nationals". Nothing unusual. If till yesterday only "secular liberals", and "left-liberals" were declared anti-national, facts, however, appear to have begun surfacing that, now, guns are being trained against those who could be qualified as right liberals, too. Let me be specific.

Saint Teresa By Fr Cedric Prakash SJ* In 2017, Pope Francis dedicated a special day, to be observed by the Universal Church, every year, as the ‘World Day of the Poor’. This year it will be observed on November 17 on the theme ‘The hope of the poor shall not perish for ever’; in a message for the day Pope Francis says:

By Sanjeev Sirohi* If more high court benches are created all over India, as was very recommended by the 230th report of the Law Commission of India, it will produce luminaries like the Chief Justice of India (CJI)-designate Sharad Arvind Bobde. It was the Nagpur High Court Bench which nurtured and groomed him as lawyer.

By Sheshu Babu* Another anniversary of Bhopal Gas tragedy will pass by next month but still many poor people are suffering the after effects of the release of poisonous gas. Many activists are still engaged in struggle for justice. One of the oldest activists, Abdul Jabbar led the largest group of survivors of the Union Carbide gas leak in 1984.

By Neeraj Nanda* Melbourne: It’s handy for a person living here to say he/she came from a particular country with the passport stamp giving the date and year of entry into Australia. That makes easier to chart out Australian demography with extensive census statistics. But Tony Joseph answers a similar question in his 262 page multi-disciplinary  book , "Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From" in a different context.

By Venkatesh Nayak* “To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous (RTI applications) fortune, or to take arms against a sea of (information requesters) troubles and by opposing end (their right to know) them.” (With apologies to Shakespeare for a poor parody of his creative genius and “Hamlet — the brooding Prince of Denmark”) Unlike his contrarian predecessor, the present Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi has, in concert with four brother Justices, declared his august office, covered by the RTI Act. In its 15th year of implementation, this unanimous opinion of the Constitution Bench (CB) strengthens the transparency law in many ways and paves the way for bringing another constitutional authority, namely, the Governor of a State under its compass. That question of law opened up twelve years ago through an RTI application penned by a former Union Defence Minister when he was the Leader of Opposition in Goa. ...

Ranjanben in DySP office on November 10 By Pankti Jog* The alleged illegal detention of a visually challenged Right to Information (RTI) and disability rights activist, Ranjanben Vaghela, has taken an unusual turn, with the police, in a reply to her RTI plea, have said, they did not have “any records” of her “detention.”