-The Hindu Everybody has a favourite villain to blame, yet the herd of restive elephants in the room is led by a particularly malevolent matriarch — corruption The floods have abated in Bengaluru. As individuals struggle to clean their houses, the silt on the roads left behind by the receding water — now a fine dust that flies in the air choking us — is a reminder of those difficult times. Various analyses...

-TheThirdPole.net Up to 70% of women in parts of the drought-prone region in central India are affected by acute water shortages, according to one NGO estimate Every day during the summer months, Kamlawati Yadav wakes up at 6 am and walks half a kilometre to a house with a private borewell. “Getting water is the first thing I do,” Kamlawati says. “I carry one water container on my head and a second...

-Down to Earth blog Women workers in garment industry share stories of gender discrimination, insensitive treatment and government apathy  The garment industry has long been under the microscope for flouting labour codes, breaking environmental norms, violating human rights, pay structures and much more. The women garment workers who attended an orientation workshop at a hotel on Delhi-Gurugram road October 2021, headed by Society for Labour and Development (SLD), know about these flaws. In...

-The Hindu COP26 must focus sharply on reducing emissions till 2030, rather than on net zero 2050, which is too distant a goal The stage is set for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, starting October 31. Major preparatory conferences and bilateral meetings have been held to persuade countries to raise their emission reduction commitments from the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) under the Paris Agreement. Some...

-The Hindu Kerala and Karnataka have shown how democratic decentralisation has worked in their favour Mahatma Gandhi envisioned that a free India would rest on a foundation of gram panchayats, village republics that governed locally and epitomised Swaraj in practice. B.R. Ambedkar was sceptical; he described the caste-ridden, unequal village society as a cesspool. Yet, he was not unequivocally against decentralisation. Locally relevant initiatives The 73rd Constitutional Amendment mandates the constitution of panchayats at...