Professor Arjun Appadurai is a Mumbaikar at heart; coming to the city is an annual pilgrimage for this internationally renowned cultural theorist and anthropologist. Appadurai, 62, who studied in Mumbai’s Elphinstone College, is currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He has been consultant and advisor to a wide range of public and private foundations such as The Smithsonian. In his seminal work Disjuncture and...
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RTI lessons for Class VIII students unlikely next year
-The Times of India The citizen empowering tool of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, is finding it tough to make an entry into the text books of the state high school syllabus. The AP State Council for Education Research and Training (APSCERT) had accepted the state information commission's proposal to introduce RTI in Class VIII text books in 2010. It was then decided that the lesson on RTI would be...
More »Starvation deaths in Assam Tea Estate
Historians tell us of the colonial era stories of miserable conditions of workers, even bonded labour, in tea plantations of eastern India. However, the situation improved after independence. In the past few decades the tea industry has made steady profits even in worst years of economic downturn. And that is why reports of starvation deaths in tea plantations of Assam are so shocking. An Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) report says that...
More »Dr Abhijit Sen, Member-Planning Commission of India, interviewed by Ajay Vir Jakhar and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
Dr Abhijit Sen is Member, Planning Commission of India. He is a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge (currently on leave as Professor of Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University) and has also taught at the Universities of Sussex, Oxford and Cambridge. Besides serving various think tanks in the states and at the centre, Dr Sen has been a consultant with UNDP, ILO, FAO and various other multilateral...
More »No Bundle Packs Here by Anuradha Raman
Farmer suicides are endemic, who knew? Chances are no one’s heard about Azad’s death in Bachlapur village though Lalitpur, where the Congress, the BSP and the SP are in a battle for votes, is only 15 km away. Farmer suicides aren’t an election plank and parties prefer trading corruption charges. Rahul Gandhi’s much-touted Bundelkhand development authority proposal remains just that. More than 500 committed suicide in the Bundelkhand region last...
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