The alleged incident of two quarry workers in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district being forced to swallow faeces draws attention to larger issues. NORMALLY the villages and hamlets in and around Thiruvakkarai in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district are woken up by the loud noise and vibrations caused by the blasting of rocks and the pounding of boulders with sledge hammers, apart from the rattling sound of tipper lorries transporting stones from 40-odd...
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Dr Abhijit Sen, Member-Planning Commission of India, interviewed by Ajay Vir Jakhar and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
Dr Abhijit Sen is Member, Planning Commission of India. He is a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge (currently on leave as Professor of Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University) and has also taught at the Universities of Sussex, Oxford and Cambridge. Besides serving various think tanks in the states and at the centre, Dr Sen has been a consultant with UNDP, ILO, FAO and various other multilateral...
More »No Bundle Packs Here by Anuradha Raman
Farmer suicides are endemic, who knew? Chances are no one’s heard about Azad’s death in Bachlapur village though Lalitpur, where the Congress, the BSP and the SP are in a battle for votes, is only 15 km away. Farmer suicides aren’t an election plank and parties prefer trading corruption charges. Rahul Gandhi’s much-touted Bundelkhand development authority proposal remains just that. More than 500 committed suicide in the Bundelkhand region last...
More »Starvation deaths in Assam Tea Estate
Historians tell us of the colonial era stories of miserable conditions of workers, even bonded labour, in tea plantations of eastern India. However, the situation improved after independence. In the past few decades the tea industry has made steady profits even in worst years of economic downturn. And that is why reports of starvation deaths in tea plantations of Assam are so shocking. An Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) report says that...
More »Satara man kills daughter for wanting to marry outside caste by Chandan Haygunde and Anuradha Mascarenhas
When Asha Shinde left Aundh in Maharashtra’s dusty Satara district to pursue the dream of a career in Pune a couple of years ago, she demonstrated to her sleepy hometown a quiet defiance that it was unfamiliar with. On Tuesday, the shocked town was saying it is even less familiar with what happened two days ago. On Sunday morning, 25-year-old Asha was bludgeoned to death by her Father in their home...
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