Counterview

By A Representative In a series of tweets from its Twitter account, the official WikiLeaks has said that Julian Assange, Australian publisher and journalist, who is editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks, never submitted that Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was incorruptible. Releasing an explosive piece of information by digging out the tweets, a Gujarat-based website run by a prominent anti-Modi advocate, Mukul Sinha, has said that with these tweets, Modi’s lie that the US called him an incorruptible politician stands “completely exposed.”

By A Representative In a new analysis, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the country’s powerful independent statistical organization, has sought to debunk the claim that Gujaratis and Bengalis are among the most mobile people of India. In its latest analysis, carried out by CMIE expert Mahesh Vyas, it has said, “Air passengers from West Bengal were 118 thousand per million population and those from Gujarat were 85,000 per million population. In comparison, Maharashtra had a traffic of 304 thousand per million population and Kerala was 285 thousand.”

By Fr Cedric Prakash* It has been a long and eventful day for me, culminating in a train journey. Although I still have a fever and feel rather exhausted, here I am putting this down as I promised a lady on the train that I would write and tell the world of her magnanimous gesture... A rally had been organised by SOUL (Save Our Land) at the Azad Maidan in Mumbai to protest the Church land acquisitions. I was one of the speakers invited to address the people gathered. The crowds were much more than the organisers had expected.

By Rajiv Shah In what many may consider as another “expose” of the Gujarat development model sought to be sold across the country during the Lok Sabha elections, the latest National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report, “Level and Pattern of Consumer Expenditure, 2011-12”, released in February 2014, has revealed that the average spending capacity of Gujarat households, as reflected in monthly per capita expenditure (MPCE), is lower than 11 out of 20 major states in the rural areas and nine out of 20 major states in the urban areas. 

By Rajiv Shah  An ILO-sponsored study has suggested that Gujarat development has failed to end gender discrimination in the job market. In fact, Gujarat is one of the four Indian states, whose labour rate participation rate has registered a decline. The study, “Low Female Employment in a Period of High Growth: Insights from Primary Survey in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat”, commissioned by the International Labour Organization, and carried out by Santosh Mehrotra, Partha Saha, Ankita Gandhi, Kamala Devi and Sharmistha Sinha, for the Institute of Applied Manpower Research, Planning Commission, Government of India, has found that, despite being a developed state, Gujarat has a higher level of occupational segregation as well as gender-based wage disparity in most of the occupations. “In vast majority of cases, female workers did not have any social security benefits to fall back on. Household responsibilities, social obligations, and security concerns often forced females to accept rather...

By A Representative In a fresh move, Gujarat’s top environmental body Paryavaran Mitra has wondered why is the Gujarat government reluctant to send more than 1,700 projects to the Government of India for environmental clearance pending delay in the formation of the State-level Expert Appraisal Committee (SEAC) of the Environment Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA). Saying that the delay has stalled implementation of these projects, most of which are of small scale nature, Paryavaran Mitra said, the law is very clear that in case SEAC is not formed, projects should be sent to the Centre.

By A Representative A recent meeting at the prestigious London School of Economics (LSE) is learnt to have reached the conclusion that India, facing general elections, is “on the brink of a dangerous crossroads”, because, it felt, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, as representative of the “rightwing BJP” and allegedly “implicated” in the “massacres of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002”, has fair chances of winning.” The meeting was organised by UK’s Freedom without Fear Platform in collaboration with the LSE Gender Institute and South Asia Solidarity Group.

By Rajiv Shah  Industrial investment trend suggests that much of the propaganda around Gujarat development has little or no basis. While there has been sharp rise in industrial investment intentions, the actual implementation has taken a backseat, and so has employment generation.  At a time when there is an acceleration in propaganda across India about Gujarat’s developmental model, which has allegedly helped attract highest-ever investment in the state compared to any other of state of India, resulting in the claim of a sharp rise in employment, the Gujarat government’s own industries department data suggest that there is a huge gap between intended industrial investments and projected job creation and actual investment commissioned resulting in real employment. Worse, the data suggest that there has been a sharp deceleration in the rate of job creation as also actual implementation of projects in Gujarat. A major reason for this could be that, according to experts, Gujarat ...

By A Representative   Senior United Nations (UN) official Heiner Bielefeldt has sharply criticized the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, which says that “a person who wants to convert to another religion must first get permission from the district magistrate to do so”. Calling this as an “unreasonable restriction not only on people’s right to convert to another religion, but also their right to propagate their own religion”, Bielefeldt, who is UN special rapporteur on religious freedom, and examined similar anti-conversion laws across different states, has particularly taken strong exception to the law in Gujarat.

By A Representative The world’s powerful business journal, Forbes Asia, in its latest issue (March 24, 2014), in an article titled “Doing Big Business in Modi's Gujarat”, has accused the Narendra Modi government of handing over Gujarat’s Adani Group cheap land, on which it “has built his cash cow – the country’s private port by volume, as well as a 4,620-megawatt coal-fired power plant.” Adani has, says the journal, “over the years, leased 7,350 hectares–much of which he got from 2005 onward from the government in Mundra in the Gulf of Kutch in Gujarat.”