-The Indian Express We can add millions of hectares to irrigated land without building a single new dam. We just need to adopt a different method of managing the water already stored in them. One of the drivers of India’s irrigation sector has been the construction of large dams on our rivers, which Jawaharlal Nehru famously described as “the temples of modern India”. While these dams have helped increase India’s irrigated...
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Threat to India’s vibrant civil society -Meenakshi Ganguly
-The Asian Age In granting anticipatory bail to Teesta Setelvad and Javed Anand on August 11, the Bombay high court noted: “A dissenting view cannot be said to be against the sovereignty of the nation.” Like several other recent rulings by the judiciary, the high court also reminded the state of its duty to protect a citizen’s right to criticise and disagree. Successive Indian governments have told the world proudly of the...
More »India's Handloom Challenge Anatomy of a Crisis -Ashoke Chatterjee
-Economic and Political Weekly The Indian weaver is dismissed in high places as an embarrassing anachronism, despite demand for his or her skills and products. In the new millennium, globalisation and a mindless acquiescence to imported notions of a good life threaten to take over, even as the West looks East for better concepts of sustainable living. Analysing today's crisis in the handloom sector, plagued by low-cost imitations from power looms,...
More »Death penalty files ‘lost, eaten by termites’ -Pradeep Thakur & Himanshi Dhawan
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Records of death penalty convicts who have been executed since independence have gone missing from many prisons with the National Law University (NLU), conducting a first of its kind study, able to confirm data related to 755 executions since 1947. "Some prison authorities have written to us that either the records have been lost or destroyed by termites," NLU director Anup Surendranath told TOI, who is...
More »Here's proof that poor get gallows, rich mostly escape -Himanshi Dhawan & Pradeep Thakur
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The fact that our legal system is skewed against the poor and marginalized is well-known. And to that extent, it's only expected that they get harsher punishment than the rich. But here are figures that tell the full story. A first of its kind study, which has analyzed data from interviews with 373 death row convicts over a 15-year period, has found three-fourths of those given...
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