-The Telegraph Lessons to take away from the two recent calamities in NorthEast It is never easy to rationalise tragedy. The two witnessed recently in the Northeast are no exceptions. One, the Assam floods in which the state’s two major rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Barak, and their tributaries wreaked havoc, killing nearly 200 people and, at one point, putting close to 4.5 million people in danger of starvation and disease. Two,...
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Adding digital layers of indignity -Rajendran Narayanan
-The Hindu Dehumanisation is the likely outcome when humane aspects of governance get outsourced to technologies The right to live with dignity is a constitutional imperative. However, it rarely manifests in discussions surrounding digital initiatives in governance. Centralised data dashboards — valuable as they are — have become the go-to mode for assessing policies, relegating principles such as human dignity and hardships in accessing rights to its blind spots. Often when technological...
More »PM Modi May Decry 'Revdi Culture' – But it Still Runs Our Political Economy -Arun Kumar
-TheWire.in There is little doubt that the practice of handing out freebies undermines both democracy and development. But the problem doesn't lie just with the opposition. Constitutional authorities in India have recently spoken about key challenges the country is facing. The Chief Justice of India (CJI) has said that there is “diminishing” space for the opposition, that there was no longer any mutual respect between the Union government and the opposition, and that...
More »Meet A Ramakrishnan from Theni -- warrior with RTI armour -Jeyalakshmi Ramanujam
-The New Indian Express In another incident, he got information that 13 engineers of Madurai Corporation were being promoted without proper documents. THENI: It’s 5 am on Saturday and A Ramakrishnan is busy packing his bags. He has to travel for long hours to educate a new batch of enthusiasts about the Right To Information (RTI) Act. This routine on Saturdays, over the past 14 years, has taken him across the State. The...
More »The case of the powerful, powerless sarkari officer -Yamini Aiyar
-Deccan Herald My colleague and I were in a District Education Office in Bihar. It had all the typical trappings of power. The officer we were meeting arrived with a litany of staff carrying his papers (and lunch box). In the short walk to his chamber, he barked orders to his staff, and as he sat on his chair and removed his Ray-Ban glasses, he commanded waiting visitors (mostly local residents...
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