It is said that only God and a few good men and women run India. One such man is P H Kurien. For readers unfamiliar with his name, Kurien was India's Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks until March 12, 2012. On March 9, 2012, just three days before he left office, he issued the first-ever compulsory licence in India for the manufacture of a drug still under patent....
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Chorus of unreason -TK Rajalakshmi
Political parties across the spectrum get into a tangle over an innocuous cartoon in a school textbook THE textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) are in the news again. This time, it is not history but political science textbooks that managed to get almost all Members of Parliament on their feet on an emotive issue and for reasons that defied logic. One day before the 60th...
More »Tribals have lost their farmlands over the century -KD Singh
The marginalisation of tribals in the last few decades has been enormous. Tribals have lost out in agriculture, and their forests also stand depleted, writes KD Singh In 2006, the Prime Minister described the Maoist threat as “the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by the country” and suggested development in insurgency-affected regions as the key remedy. In 2009, the Union Government announced a new nationwide initiative, the ‘Integrated Action...
More »Through the Lens of a Constitutional Republic The Case of the Controversial Textbook by Peter Ronald deSouza
The textbook controversy is an opportunity for us to explore some of our core constitutional principles, especially the relationship between Parliament and freedom of expression. Parliament is certainly the space to discuss complaints of “offensive material” but should exercise its option of withdrawal of the textbooks in the “last instance” not in the “first instance” as has been done in this case. Peter Ronald deSouza (peter@csds.in) is the director of the...
More »Politics and Pedagogy The NCERT Texts and Cartoons by Valerian Rodrigues
School texts that teach young minds that politics is a contentious and critical but reasonable activity, that it is not merely a set of demands and commands, and that politicians have to be responsive and accountable are naturally disliked by the political class. This is the tone of all the Political Science textbooks of Standards IX-XI brought out after 2006. The nurturing of a culture of critical public opinion seems...
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