Counterview

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.

By Rajiv Shah  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 toilets scam 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 (photo) of the Mahiti Adhikar Gujarat Pahel (MAGP), a state-based RTI NGO.

Counterview News    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 a...

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.

Counterview News    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, Ahmedabad, Mehsana, Sabarkantha, Anand, Kheda, Panchmahal...

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.

Counterview News    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 ...

Counterview News    The latest National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) report, “Employment and Unemployment Situation among Major Religious Groups in India”, of June 2013, should prove to be a huge shocker to those who consider Gujarat as the most successful developmental model of Hindutva experiment. Even as looking into issues like labour force work participation rate across India, the report has sought to analyze inter-religious differentials among states to find out how labour force of each religious group is shaping up. And for this, it has offered religion-wise current attendance rates in educational institutions, i.e. the number of persons attending any educational institution per 1000 persons, alongside literacy levels. This has been done in order to provide an “idea of the quality of human capital for the future workforce”, to quote from the report. The results of the study are astonishing. In the age-group 5-14, the attendance rate of Gujarat’s Hindus in education...

By A Representative  Three senior environmentalists, Krishnakant, Rohit Prajapati and Swati Desai of the Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, in a statement have alleged that the recent move of the the Gujarat government's department of environment and forest giving coastal regulatory zone (CRZ) clearance to the proposed 6000 MW Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) at Mithi Virdi "is an act of endorsing the illegal and unconstitutional act of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) and the Engineers India Limited (EIL)."

By A Representative In a letter to the Gujarat chief minister, representatives of 1,400 "displaced employees" of Sai InfoSystem (India) Ltd (SIS), which was a Vibrant Gujarat 2013 sponsor, have sought the CM's intervention in Gujarat's largest IT company's move to ease out more than 400 employees and their respective families in Gujarat, alongside 1,000 plus employees and their families across the country. "This ill-fated organization was incidentally the diamond sponsors of Vibrant Gujarat Summit held in the month of February 2013", the letter reminds the CM.