The road to Khardung La begins in the Indian town of Leh on the northwestern fringe of the Himalayas. Exhaust-spewing army trucks rattle up the side of dry rock, past Buddhist monasteries clinging to the craggy mountainside and alongside small farms barely scraping fertility from the earth. Khardung La, the highest motorable mountain pass in the world, is more than 18,000 ft. above sea level, the air so thin that...
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The growing threats to Human Rights by Ramesh Thakur
In most cases, the gravest threats to the Human Rights of citizens emanate from states. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed on December 10, 1948, transformed an aspiration into legally binding standards and spawned a raft of institutions to scrutinise government conformity and condemn noncompliance. It remains the central organising principle of global Human Rights and a source of power and authority on behalf of victims. A Human Right, owed...
More »The Ground Beneath Our Feet by Tripti Lahiri
CITIES MAKE one simple promise to newcomers: Sacrifice yourself to me and your children shall prosper. This promise drew Ahmed Raza, a small-time wrestler from an Uttar Pradesh village and millions like him to the capital of newly-independent India. Raza kept his part of the bargain, yet half a century later, his daughter was pushed out of the city her father helped build, the only home she has known. “I...
More »Alarming deaths of children in Tribal MP
According to a report by Shirish Khare in NewsWing.com, a news portal dedicated to raising the issues of the voiceless in the Hindi belt, 25 children have died in just two villages of Meghnagar block in the month of October at the tribal dominated Jhabua district of Madhya Pradesh. The report (see text link below) cites under-nutrition as the likely reason for the tragedy. The alarming NewsWing.com report says that the...
More »Women still suffer discrimination 30 years after global treaty banned it – UN chief
Thirty years after an international treaty banning discrimination against women came into force, women and girls are still suffering from the scourge, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned today. “Violence against women and girls is found in all countries,” he told a session of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) marking the three decades of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). “The results...
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