The country is in a vortex of challenges, counter-challenges and suspicious suggestions even amongst good friends on the desirability or otherwise of inclusion of caste in Census 2011. I feel that a calmer discussion may clear a number of cobwebs. It is common ground that the caste system exists in our country since centuries. It is unnecessary to dilate upon the origin of caste; whether due to the freezing of the...
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Whistleblowers at receiving end after using RTI by Meena Menon
While Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan is proud that the State has an impressive 98.69 per cent disposal rate of requests under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, the murder of two campaigners who used the law to good effect is a blot. First, it was Satish Shetty at Talegaon, near Pune, who was killed on January 13, and more recently Dattatray Patil at Ichalkaranji, in Kolhapur district, on May 22....
More »Aruna Roy interviewed by Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta
Aruna Roy, the prominent political and social activist who spearheaded the campaign to institute the Right To Information Act in the 1990s, is an ardent critic of the anti-people and exclusionary policies of the first and the second United Progressive Alliance governments. A recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 2000, she heads the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathana (a trade union of workers and peasants) in Rajasamand, Rajasthan,...
More »Why the UID number project must be scrapped by Gopal Krishna
Activist Gopal Krishna makes a case that the Unique Identification Number project is a gross violation of fundamental human rights and points out that a similar project/law in Britain is going to be repealed. This is with reference to a privacy invasion project which is relevant to India and all the democratic countries of the world. The very first bill that is to be presented by the UK's new coalition...
More »Patient Revolution by M Rajshekhar
The word ‘Mitanin’ was derived from a Chhattisgarhi custom, where a ‘mitanin’ is a girl bonded ceremoniously in her childhood to another girl as a lifelong friend IT IS quite common for tractors in rural India to haul all kinds of unusual cargo. Even then, a late night emergency shuttle, from a small home in Narayanpaal village in the backward Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, to ferry a pregnant woman in...
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