-United Nations Human Rights Office of The High Commissioner GENEVA 22 SEPTEMBER 2021: On the eve of the Food Systems Summit, UN human rights experts are deeply concerned that the event will not be a “people’s summit” as promised. They are worried that the Summit will instead leave behind the most marginalized and vulnerable people. According to the three human rights experts, who were involved in the Summit preparation, “The Summit claims...

-Down to Earth Cyclones in India, particularly in the Sundarbans, made locals vulnerable to traffickers and drove them into forced labour, the report flagged  Climate change-induced extreme weather events put women, children and minorities at risk of modern slavery and human trafficking. The phenomenon is on the rise in India, among other countries, warned the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and Anti-Slavery International in a recent report.  Modern slavery — including...

The pandemic's first wave had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of rural workers in Bihar (including the self-employed) last year, according to a survey based research, jointly done by economists from Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University, Australia and the New Delhi-based Institute for Human Development. A recent press note issued by the authors of the study shows that almost 94.4 percent of the households participating...

-Press release by United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner GENEVA (16 July 2021): UN human rights experts* today called on India to halt evictions of some 100,000 people – including 20,000 children – that began this week in the midst of monsoon rains. Demolition of homes began on Wednesday, 14 July, in a village in Haryana State built on protected forest land, even though the forest was actually destroyed...

-The Hindu Blaming ‘the system’ alone for Father Stan Swamy’s death obscures how India’s political economy is linked to deprival When an officer from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) came to interrogate Father Stan Swamy last monsoon, the Jesuit sociologist, then 83, in turn asked him about police integrity, and why a father-son duo (P. Jayaraj and Bennicks) should die of custodial torture in a Tamil Nadu police lock-up. It was quintessential...