Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...
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Exempting CBI from RTI counter-productive: Habibullah by Tanu Sharma
Days after the government placed the CBI under the category of organisations “exempt” from the RTI Act, the country’s first Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah has “requested” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to let the Central agency remain within the ambit of the transparency Act as “public interest would best be served by keeping these bodies transparent and accountable within the limits of the law”. However, the CBI has defended the move...
More »Undermining people’s power - A story of five years by Nikhil Dey
More than five years have passed since the world’s largest employment programme was launched in India. The scale of employment generated was not the only reason that this is a path breaking legislation. The MGNREGA is the first national law to establish rights in the development sector. It is demand based, and not constrained by arbitrary and restrictive selections like the Below Poverty Line (BPL) list. Any person living in a...
More »The Tyranny of AFSPA and Why it a Scar on Democracy by Babloo Loitongbam
This paper was presented at the Regional Workshop on War on Terror and Asian Democracy 17 May 2011, Kim Dae-Jung Convention Centre, South Korea organised by Solidarity for Democratization Movement in Asia (SDMA) Introduction In the discourse on terrorism and counter terrorism, September 11 stands as a watershed because of the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. Government of India (GoI) also took full advantage of the ‘War on Terror’...
More »“What is this World Day Against Child Labour?”
-The Hindu Golu is 12 years old and wants to go to school like all other children of his age. But for him, it is just a dream as he has to spend his entire day cleaning dirt and dishes at a roadside dhaba in south Delhi. Raju, a 10-year-old from Jharkhand, toils on the streets in the national capital selling flowers along with his younger brother. These are not just the...
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