A research-based study of budgets of major Indian states by a top advocacy group, Accountability Initiative, has found that despite loud claims of the Gujarat government about its “rising budgetary allocation” for the social sector, things have failed to improve much vis-à-vis several other states, at least with regard to primary education. The study, titled “Do Schools Get Their Money? Paisa 2012”, released this year, has found that not only does Gujarat government allocate less funds in its budget for primary school education compared to other states, expenditure per student, too, has been going down. The result is, quality of education at the primary level has suffered badly. Claiming to be the “first and only citizen-led effort at the national level to track public expenditure”, the study is based on a survey of over 14,000 schools across India (14,591 in 2012), and seeks to investigate how grants in Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), which is Government of India’s (GoI’s) primary vehicl...

The CRISIL Research -- which has made a quick assessment of the impact of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2012 (formerly known as the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011) on real estate,  infrastructure and industry -- has said that the Bill will lead to “increase in the gestation time of projects and overall costs.” The Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha on August 30, 2013. The bill, which replaces the century-old Land Acquisition Act, 1894, proposes a unified legislation for acquisition of land and adequate rehabilitation mechanisms for all affected persons.

Latest National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) data on India’s employment trend has suggested that there is a relatively slow movement of Gujarat’s workforce from the agricultural sector to the non-agricultural sectors than the rest of India – the secondary sector (which includes manufacturing, mining and construction; and the tertiary sector, which include wholesale and retail trade, repair work, transportation, information and communication, real state, finance and insurance, education and health, and professional services. While any movement from agriculture to industry and services is regarded by economists as a “natural” corollary to development of a vibrant economy, the slow movement, if experts are to be believed, would suggest two simultaneous trends – Gujarat’s higher capital intensive industrialization, on one hand, and failure to develop such sectors like information and communication technology as part of development of services, on the other. The NSSO figures show that ...

A recent analysis of the way different state governments have been handling rural health suggests that Gujarat is one of the three major states in India which have slowed down their expenditure on various programmes being implemented under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), the Government of India’s largest public health programme. Launched in 2005, a breakup of expenditure for two consecutive years, financial year (FY) 2010-11 and 2011-12, suggests wide gap between states in implementing it.

Will Gujarat’s riot victims, especially those who were displaced during the carnage that rocked the state following the burning of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra railway station on February 27, 2002, ever be shown Sadbhavna (or compassion) by the Gujarat government by providing them with jobs in government or semi-government agencies? While some compensation has been paid to the victims of 1,169 persons who were officially killed during the carnage, as also to those who suffered injury or those whose property was damaged, this was only following Government of India disbursement of funds. Meanwhile, a distinct view has emerged among human rights activists that such type of compensation is not enough to ensure that the riot victims start living a normal life. More than one lakh people were internally displaced during the riots. They were forced to flee their home. Thousands have still not be able to return to their original place of living and are living in 86 relief colonies built acro...

Proactive disclosure under the right to information (RTI) Act underscores the need to voluntarily disclose information on subsidy schemes, which should be published and updated on a monthly basis. In this overall framework, the Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India, directed all states to not just kick-start social audit of the working of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), under which jobs are legally guaranteed to the rural poor for 100 days in a year to adult members of any household willing to do unskilled manual public work at the statutory minimum wage of Rs 120 per day in 2009 prices, failing which the government has to pay the salary at home. It also directed states to make voluntary disclosure of such social audit. The working of MGNREGS in Gujarat has come under attack from those who are considered detractors of the state government. A Government of India document having “VIP Reference” gives a list of 17 such complaints. Well...

The Gujarat government’s powerful arm implementing the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP), Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd (SSNNL), has said that Madhya Pradesh has yet to pay up a whopping Rs 3,159.88 crore against the nieghbouring state’s share of expenditure in the SSP, followed by Maharashtra’s Rs 1,437.50 crore and Rajasthan’s Rs 471.70 crore. The statement is an “update” as on May 12, 2013 of the “Status Report on SSP”, sent by the SSNNL to the Narmada Control Authority (NCA) – the Government of India-appointed inter-state authority to give a final nod to the project’s various components – in December 2012.

Seven years after the committee headed by Justice (retired) Rajinder Sachar, appointed by the Prime Minister to quantify relative backwardness among Indian Muslims, submitted its report revealing how the minority community remained on the back-foot in education and other social sectors vis-à-vis other communities, a new report by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) has given state-wise inter-religious comparisons, belying claims by certain quarters that Gujarat Muslims have lately been doing better than the rest of India and other communities. Released in July 2013 and titled “Employment and Unemployment Situation among Major Religious Groups in India”, the report is particularly important as it provides facts on not just literacy levels of different communities, but also rate of attendance in educational institutions. The report finds 81.4 per cent attendance rate of Hindu children of the age group 5-14 in Gujarat’s educational institutes. This is against 78.7 per cent rate...

In was January-end 2008. I was planning a story on spurt of investment in Kutch district of Gujarat after the killer quake of January 26, 2001. I called up RJ Shah, then chief principal industrial advisor (a strange designation, I thought, principal and chief together!), and he immediately responded, saying, he had all the details and I should reach his office in the industries commissionerate in Udyog Bhawan, Gandhinagar. A diligent government official who always had all the industry figures on his tips – something which is a rarity in the babudom today – Shah scanned through his papers and was simply awestruck: “This is absolutely marvelous. Kutch has as of today Rs 78,688 crore worth of investment under implementation, which comes to 39 per cent of Gujarat.” Then, Shah decided to have a closer look at the investment proposals, and one of them happened to be a solar project. “Wait, wait, wait”, he looked through his traditional spectacles. “This is really very strange. This solar pr...

  Over 700 non-resident Indians and citizens have signed onto an online petition addressed to the President of India, expressing their support for the decision of the Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) on June 3, 2013, to bring six national political parties of India under the purview of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Since the national political parties receive substantial funding from the government for their functioning, they were deemed by the CIC as public authorities, under Sections 2(a) and 2(h)(d) of the RTI Act.

  In a scathing reply to the Gujarat government-sponsored study, “Impact of Caste Discrimination and Distinctions on Equal Opportunities: A Study of Gujarat”, carried out in five of Gujarat’s villages to “prove” that there is no wide-scale practice of untouchability in the state, a “resurvey” in the same five villages has found it prevails in all its manifestations.  Carried out by Navsarjan Trust, a state human rights organization, the “resurvey” says that in every walk of life – whether it is temple entry, social or cultural festivals, or access to basic necessities – untouchability is widely prevalent, something the government-supported study has sought to "undermine".

The Gujarat government has claimed that there exists a huge support for the Bhadbhut weir-cum-causeway, which it is seeking to implement by spending Rs 4,000 crore on the mouth of Narmada river. Revealing this in the minutes of the Environmental Public Hearing (EPH) on Bhadbhut, put on the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) website (click  HERE  to see minutes), the state government has said, “Out of total 54 written representations received with respect to the public hearing, 32 representations are with affirmative nod, i.e. fully supporting this project, having multi-facet benefits for its implementation in the interest of public at large”. However, an analysis of the 32 “positive” written responses reveals certain glaring discrepancies. First of all, of the 32 “positive responses” which have been purportedly been handed over to the Bharuch district collector, who was chairman of the EPH, held on July 19, there is just one environmental organization, which too operates f...

  In a major admission, the Gujarat government has said that government pleaders are so preoccupied with their jobs that they are “unable to address” and give “enough time” to fight cases related with Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. A government resolution (GR) issued by the state’s social justice and empowerment department with the specific intention of raising the conviction rate of atrocities cases has said that in the recent past the state government has witnessed a sharp fall in the ability to take up atrocity cases.

One of most naïve arguments on rural areas, including those of Gujarat, has been regarding their homogeneous characteristic — the existence of “harmonious” social relations in which “self-sufficient” village communities live in a peaceful atmosphere. Based on this type of thinking, the Gujarat chief minister began his now famous “samras” experiment, under which village panchayats elected uncontested should be rewarded. However, sociologists have long demonstrated that in areas of strong homogeneity, there is a general tendency to repress controversy. As a result, when disagreements arise, they can result into serious crises. Well-known human rights organization Navsarjan Trust’s documentary evidence, collected from several villages of Gujarat, recorded in several of its reports (click  HERE  to see them) has long suggested how such homogeneity in a caste-ridden society is a sham. Despite efforts by Dalit NGOs to fight discrimination against Dalits, as evidenced during their re...

The Gujarat government is planning a huge mela of village panchayat leaders from all over the country in Gandhinagar on August 17, 2013. Last year, it was a state-level function, where awards were distributed to those village panchayats which elected their bodies and sarpanches without contest, thus becoming “samras” panchayats. However, facts collected by Navsarjan Trust, Ahmedabad-based human rights organization, suggest that caste dynamics in villages are so strong that such “samras” show has little or no meaning. Latest information collected by the NGO suggest that the Gujarat ruling establishment’s all-out efforts to “encourage” homogeneity in the state’s rural areas by having as many “samras” village panchayats without elections as possible are already coming to a naught. Documentary evidence collected on the basis of field reports show that at a large number of places, the upper castes are not only refusing to give up their hegemony, but are doing all they can in their capacity ...

  A huge scam is suspected to be taking shape in Gujarat -- the scam to build toilets on paper. The first signs of the scam were visible in a small village in Jamnagar district, Nandana, situated in Kalyanapur taluka. "Things would have never come to light had a casual worker not filed a right to information (RTI) application in order to find out how many persons of the village had applied for grants to build individual toilets toilets scam their houses and how many of them were approved by the District Rural Development Agency (DRDA) under Government of India's total sanitation programme", said senior activist Pankti Jog  (photo)  of the Mahiti Adhikar Gujarat Pahel (MAGP), a state-based RTI NGO.

 In a complete about-turn, the Gujarat government has asserted that it never asked the CEPT University to review or refute an NGO study by Navsarjan Trust on wide prevalence of untouchability in Gujarat's rural areas. The NGO study titled "Understanding Untouchability", carried out in 2010, was based on a survey of about 1,600 villages. The statement is in total contrast to what the introduction to the CEPT report says -- that the state government had sponsored it in order to "review" the NGO study and find out if there was such wide prevalence of untouchability as the study claims. It is not known what has prompted the state government to make a change in its stance.

The National Commission for Protection Child Rights (NCPCR) in a new report has suggested that wide regional imbalances exist in the provision of education in Gujarat. Prepared as minutes on the basis of an NCPCR team’s field visit to Kutch’s Khavda region, Rajkot, Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, the report says that development in some of the pockets of Kutch district has failed to touch the people of the region. Especially referring to the schools situated in the remote Khavda taluka, where the NCPCR team spent some time inspecting village schools on July 24, the report says, “The taluka is 70 kilometre from Bhuj, the district headquarters. And some of the villages we visited were another 50 kilomtres away. Indeed, it is possible to say that development of the region is 120 kilometres away from the mainstream.” The NCPCR team visit took place following a study of 506 government primary schools in Kutch, Ahmedabad, Mehsana, Sabarkantha, Anand, Kheda, Panchmahals and Vadodara districts in o...

The latest National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) report, “Employment and Unemployment Situation among Major Religious Groups in India”, of June 2013, should prove to be a huge shocker to those who consider Gujarat as the most successful developmental model of Hindutva experiment. Even as looking into issues like labour force work participation rate across India, the report has sought to analyze inter-religious differentials among states to find out how labour force of each religious group is shaping up. And for this, it has offered religion-wise current attendance rates in educational institutions, i.e. the number of persons attending any educational institution per 1000 persons, alongside literacy levels. This has been done in order to provide an “idea of the quality of human capital for the future workforce”, to quote from the report. The results of the study are astonishing. In the age-group 5-14, the attendance rate of Gujarat’s Hindus in educational institutions per 1,000 per...