Emily Esplen visited a community in Dhaka where inspiring community organisers are showing change is possible When I met members of the Dalit Women's Forum in Dhaka last month, they told me about the changes they want to see in their lives and communities. They want their daughters to go to school and stay in school. They want privacy and security when bathing in communal areas. They want health care and...
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Resolving the identity crisis by Malia Politzer
When a group of 46 cooks in northern Gujarat—some of whom had been working for up to seven years—demanded full payment for their labour, they were threatened, beaten, then finally thrown out with little more than the clothes they were wearing. The group—which included women and children—were all migrants from a tribal region in southern Rajasthan. They walked for three days without food to get to the nearest train station,...
More »RTI activists seek Maharashtra information commissioner’s ouster by Dinesh Thite
Right to information (RTI) activists in the city have demanded the state government to invoke section 17 (3) (e) of the RTI Act, 2005, to remove Ramanand Tiwari from the post of state information commissioner (SIC), as his son owns a flat in the controversial Adarsh Housing Society in Mumbai. President of Nagrik Chetna Manch, Maj Gen (retd) SCN Jatar, president of Sajag Nagrik Manch, Vivek Velankar, Surajya Sangharsh Samiti chief...
More »Panel hears Tirupur workers' woes
FOLLOWING a Frontline Cover Story (“Driven to despair”, October 8) that highlighted the factors contributing to the high incidence of suicide among migrant workers and their family members in Tirupur in Tamil Nadu, the Central government set up a team to look into the issue. The team's visit to the knitwear capital of India on November 30 has raised the hopes of workers, trade union functionaries and labour rights activists.Headed...
More »Enter the watchdog by KP Shashidharan
Recently an interesting article appeared in The New York Times on how after the completion of a social audit at Nagarkurnool in Andhra Pradesh, villagers punished a local official for swindling funds allocated to the central government's flagship project, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. The irate villagers tied the official's hands and paraded him around the neighbouring villages. This is not a one-off incident; similar accounts have...
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