-Newsclick.in After the Union Government announced a mission to explore mining the Indian ocean floor for rare earth minerals in this year’s budget, environment conservationists and oceanographers in India are joining global calls for a moratorium on deep sea mining. April 9, Bengaluru: Indian activists have joined worldwide environment conservationists and oceanographers in opposing the recently announced Deep Ocean Mission by the Government of India. The Mineral Inheritors Rights Association (MIRA) – an...

-Petition submitted by National Network of Sex Workers to NHRC, dated 28th May, 2019 The National Network of Sex Workers (NNSW) has recently submitted a petition to the Chairperson of National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) Hon. Justice HL Dattu regarding police brutality and raids on sex workers in Mumbai on 24th-25th May 2019. According to that petition, there has been misuse of anti-trafficking provisions of Section 370, IPC by the police...

-Counterview.net Reclaiming the Republic, a civil rights network, has released a document prepared under the chairmanship of Justice AP Shah (retired) -- and backed, among others, by Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan, bureaucrat-turned-human rights activist Harsh Mander, economist Prabhat Patnaik, Right to transparency activist Anjali Bhardwaj and social scientist Yogendra Yadav  (click HERE for full list) -- with the "aim" of putting forth policy and legislative reforms needed to “protect” and...

-Frontline.in Interview with Aruna Roy. ARUNA ROY is a well-known social and political activist. A former Indian Administrative Service officer, she resigned from the IAS in 1975 and has since worked with the most oppressed in society. Aruna Roy’s observation on government service is indicative of her future concerns: “Everyone calls it an elite service; I always felt the discourse should be a bit better than what it was. I was shocked...

-Livemint.com Ecologist Madhav Gadgil, whose report on Western Ghats was rejected by the Kerala government, on what caused the Kerala floods and how the rebuilding process should be carried out Ernakulam (Kerala): Submitted seven years ago on 31 August 2011, ecologist Madhav Gadgil’s report on the biodiverse Western Ghats—a portion of which falls in Kerala—had warned that the combination of massive ecological destruction and extreme weather events trigger disaster. His words proved...