“Quartz grinding is one of the deadliest occupations” “Slowly, but surely, every one of us who has been to the factories in Gujarat will die, and there is nothing we can do to change that,” Buddha (45) of Undli village says bitterly. Buddha lost his 18-year-old-son Mohan to acute silicosis a year ago. His 16-year-old daughter Ghamma is still suffering from the disease. Silicosis, the deadly scourge unleashed upon migrant labourers of...

700 million Indians have cell phones, but 638 million still don’t have access to proper sanitation. At this year’s South Asian Conference on Sanitation, social solutions to the problem were discussed, including “naming and shaming” and the CLTS programme which gets villagers to map the open areas where they defecate There can hardly be a bigger taboo than sanitation when it comes to the government, bureaucracy or even the people...

India's Supreme Court has granted bail to leading public health specialist and human rights activist, Dr Binayak Sen. In December a court in the central state of Chhattisgarh sentenced to life in prison for helping Maoist rebels. The lower court had found him guilty of carrying messages and setting up bank accounts for the rebels, who are active in large parts of India. Rights groups in India and abroad had called on the...

Modi appeals to Manmohan to raise height of Narmada dam ‘Rehabilitation of over 2 lakh tribals, farmers still pending' The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) on Monday urged the Union government not to accede to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's demand to raise the height of the Narmada dam to its final level even when social and environmental compliances with regard to displaced families were lagging. The dam's height at present is 122 metres. In...

I am opposed to any kind of communalism or discrimination on religious or caste lines: Hazare Beware of vilification campaign, Modi writes to social activist The clarification by social activist Anna Hazare on his praising Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for his “rural development model” has failed to satisfy his supporters who threatened to dissociate themselves from the movement against corruption. “That is exactly what we are questioning: Mr. Modi's rural development model,...