-The Hindu Bengaluru: Is Bengaluru in danger of becoming a city that is divided along the lines of class and caste? Terming today’s urban reality an apartheid city, activist and former bureaucrat Harsh Mander has said the perpetuation of caste, class and the neoliberal ‘greed is good’ motto, have made the middle class one of the most uncaring communities the world over. And what happens when the divide enters the classroom? “Rohith...
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The invisible drought -Harsh Mander
-The Indian Express We have turned our back to the intense food and drinking water distress across states India has transformed spectacularly in innumerable ways in the last two decades. One of the least noted changes is in the way the country — governments, the press and people — respond to drought and food scarcities. Back in the late-1980s, many states across India were reeling under back-to-back droughts for three consecutive years, not...
More »Missing the tree for the woods: Deaths due to cold
They say that fact is stranger than fiction, and the fact is that more people in India die annually due to exposure to cold weather rather than because of earthquake, cyclone or torrential rain. Data accessed from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows that every year more people die because of 'exposure to cold' than due to landslide, flood or epidemic. The report entitled Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India...
More »Why Delhi’s homeless prefer to sleep in the freezing cold than in government shelters -Harsh Mander
-Scroll.in The government is 'rescuing' unwilling homeless people from the streets and packing them off to shelters. Nobody thought of speaking to the homeless first. Winter is upon us once more. Pollution, smog and plunging temperatures transmute sleeping into a formidable daily challenge for the most dispossessed of city residents – people without homes. The more compassionate among us are stirred briefly each year about the predicament of the homeless forced to...
More »IMA needs to introspect on state of private medical services -Harsh Mander
-Hindustan Times School textbooks in recent decades have frequently become battlegrounds for ideological contestation in India. Most textbook wars are to advance majoritarian perspectives on history and culture. However, a recent very different textbook skirmish broke out about the public and private sectors in healthcare. The story of this ideological clash is bemusing and instructive, illuminating competing perspectives on the nature of education, healthcare and markets in new India. This clash surfaced...
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