Counterview

Arvind Subramanian, Josh Felman Counterview Desk In a fresh paper published by the Harvard University Center for International Development, “India’s Great Slowdown: What Happened? What’s the Way Out?”, Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic adviser to the Narendra Modi government, and Josh Felman, Director of JH Consulting, California, have said that “standard structural and cyclical factors cannot explain the long slowdown, followed by a sharp collapse.”

Counterview Desk  Commenting on the latest amendment to the Citizenship Act, which gives priority to Hindus, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians resident in India before 2014, but excludes Muslims, including minority sects, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), has said, “Although India’s broader naturalization laws remain in place, these amendments will have a discriminatory effect on people’s access to nationality.”

Counterview Desk In a statement, Ravi Kiran Jain, national president, and Dr V Suresh, national general secretary, People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) have expressed concern that, following the passing of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in Parliament, religion will be the "key determinant for obtaining Indian citizenship", with "communal, anti-Muslim bias inbuilt" into it.

Naveen Patnaik Counterview Desk The National Campaign for Peoples Right to Information (NCPRI), in a letter to Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik, has sought "a thorough, timely and effective investigation" into the murder of Right to Information (RTI) activist Abhimanyu Panda, who was shot outside his house in Kandhamal on December 10, 2019 at 7:30am by two unidentified assailants.

By Rajiv Shah  A few days back, when I met Prof Krishna Kumar in Ahmedabad, a prominent scholar on education, whom I have considered over the last two decades more as the main brain behind Prof Yash Pal’s well-known report "Learning without Burden" (1993), I just couldn’t resist recalling my interactions with him as a BA (honours) English student in Kirori Mal College in Delhi. Prof Kumar was in Ahmedabad to deliver a lecture on why our education system was failing to succeed. It was an Umashakar Joshi memorial lecture. All that I knew of Umashankar Joshi was, he was a prominent Gujarati poet and that he was vice chancellor of the Gujarat University, but had a very vague idea that he was a keen observer of education, too. Before Prof Kumar began his address, Svati Joshi, who had organized the lecture, told the Ahmedabad Management Association audience, that as a budding poet, during his youth, Umashankar Joshi organized protests in the city against making higher education the...

Amit Shah paying tribute to Savarkar By Shamsul Islam* No other organization, in the present world, can beat Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in double-speak. In fact, what George Orwell termed as "doublespeak" would be an understatement in the case of RSS. The latest proof of this nasty case was provided by the Union Home Minister Amit Shah, de facto Prime Minister and senior RSS leader in the Lok Sabha (akin to the House of Commons in England) on December 9, 2019.

Counterview Desk Senior IPS officer Abdur Rahman, IGP, Mumbai, resigned to register his civil protest against the passage of the Citizen's Amendment Bill (CAB) on December 11, the day CAB was passed in Parliament. In an open letter he had addressed to “brothers and sisters”, hours before CAB was voted in the Rajya Sabha, he said, "This Bill is against the religious pluralism of India. I request all justice loving people to oppose the bill in a democratic manner. It runs against the very basic feature of the Constitution.”

Tree felling in Talabira forests under police protection By Prafulla Samantra* In the same week as the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) summit , as world's leaders discuss climate change, in the industrial belt of Western Odisha, more than 40,000 trees were cut in Talabira forest on December 9 and 10 for establishing an open pit coalmine. 

By  A  Representative Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took over power in 2014 at the Centre, more than 80 have been killed “in their quest for information and accountability” through the Right to Information (RTI) Act, a public hearing in Delhi has been told. Senior politicians from opposition parties, including Congress and Left, heard people express their anguish over the manner in which the government was treating the RTI Act, even as refusing to operationalise the Whistleblower Protection Act, passed in 2014.

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat* When Parma Bai put the red shawl on my shoulder as the programme was about to begin, I was overwhelmed. The other friends said that this is made by local Vanakar community person who was supposed to be participating in the training programme but could not come due to his own reasons. I told friends that after our programme is over, I would like to visit some of the villages including this friend who made it for me. Our day had started with all of us garlanding the statue of Baba Saheb Ambedkar at the chowk of the city of Bachau and that made me realize how people started thronging in since the morning to pay their tribute to Dr Ambedkar on December 6th. Parma Bai is 62 year old Kutchi woman belonging to Dalit community. She came here travelling nearly 150 kilometer to participate in a training programme on Dalit and Land Rights. Her village faces threat as the Gujarat government has ‘annexed’ all the land of nearly 100 families under the ‘Shrisarkar’ land act w...