Proposed Kevadia In a clear example of how area development authorities, notified by the Gujarat government, behave vis-à-vis local villagers, a letter written by the chief executive officer, Kevadia Area Development Authority (KADA) has threatened the sarpanches of 52 villages adjoining the Narmada dam that they had better agree to hand over their villages for tourism purpose or else they would face dire consequences. The four-line letter was sent to the village sarpanches on March 6, 2013, but strangely it never became an issue till now, when the threat of their eviction from their land became even more apparent.

Has the work for the Garudeshwar weir, proposed about 12 km downstream of the Narmada dam, begun without necessary environmental and social impact assessment clearance of the Narmada Control Authority (NCA)? It would seem so, if one looks closely at the letter written by a senior member of the NCA to its chairman. The letter states, the weir would adversely impact downstream fishing activities as also the environment, about which “no assessment” appears to have been made so far.

Dr Rajan While much is being made out from the latest “Report of the Committee for Evolving a Composite Development Index of States”, prepared under the chairmanship of Dr Raghuram R Rajan, new Reserve Bank of India governor, making some states happy while others unhappy, it has something which has gone totally unnoticed. Even as clubbing Gujarat as a “less developed state”, if the recommendations of the report are accepted, Gujarat is likely to get a higher Central allocation than is the case today. Submitted to the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, the report recommends that Gujarat should be allocated 3.69 per cent of the Central share as against what was allocated by the Finance Commission – 3.12 per cent, which includes grants and share in Central taxes.

Despite the law against manual scavenging, which was made more stringent by Indian Parliament recently, new facts have come to light which go to suggest that Gujarat’s smaller towns are some the worst victims of the despicable age-old practice of manually removing excreta, imposed upon the valimiki community for generations. A recent case of Dholka town, situated around 50 kilometres from Ahmedabad, suggests that despite repeated reminders by NGOs fighting against manual scavenging, the state officialdom has failed come out its slumber, the practice continues till date. The matter first came to light after a petition was filed by Manjula Pradeep, director, Navsarjan Trust, a Gujarat-based human rights, before the National Human Rights Commission (HHRC) in January 2013. She drew attention of the NHRC about “lack of basic facilities in Dholka town”, alleging, “The situation of public dry latrines and vaada toilets is very pathetic. There is no water facility in the toilets. The doors of ...

Prof Dholakia Amidst sharp controversy raging among top scholars on whether high agricultural growth rate of Gujarat agriculture is being cited by a section of economists by choosing one of the worst drought years as the base year (2000-01), a senior economist of the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, has said come up with a new explanation of the allegedly high growth rate. He has said that a higher price for agricultural product has been the main reason why Gujarat’s agriculture grew at a higher than 10 per cent per annum between 2001 and 2011. IIM-A’s Prof Ravindra Dholakia, who is one of those who has been criticized for choosing a bad drought year as the base, has in a recent paper, “Inter-sectoral Terms of Trade and Aggregate Supply Response in Gujarat and Indian Agriculture”, has said, “Inter-sectoral terms of trade” played a major factor ”in determining the growth performance of agriculture in Gujarat and all India”, whether it was the last decade or earlier.

  Latest data obtained from sources in the Gujarat government have revealed that state agricultural production sharply dipped during the fiscal 2012-13 compared to 2011-12, such that it would suggest that the state farm sector remains highly volatile, despite claims to the contrary by the state officialdom and a group of the economists. The figures show that the foodgrains production in Gujarat dipped by a whopping 22.87 per cent, cotton production by 16.34 per cent and oil seeds production by 42.54 per cent.  The dip has come against the backdrop of claims by economists Prof Tushaar Shah and Prof Ravindra Dholakia, who have tried to prove in their respective studies that improved farm techniques and decentralized irrigation practices like checkdams and watershed projects have largely mitigated the impact of drought in Gujarat.

A new research paper, released in August 2013, “Groundwater Depletion, Adaptation and Migration: Evidence from Gujarat, India”, prepared by three scholars Ram Fishmany, Meha Jain and Avinash Kishore, published by International Growth Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has suggested how in northern Gujarat, which is one of the most groundwater-scarce regions of India, the gradual depletion of this vital resource has resulted in “shrinking of agriculture and increased migration rates by young males“, especially “those from the dominant land-owning caste”. The study is based on collection of primary data from two of North Gujarat’s talukas, Vijapur and Mansa. Significantly, it does not find no evidence that scarcity of water has led to higher investment in human capital, or in improvement in water use efficiency, despite the existence of technical potential. The scholars comment, “Given the widespread and ongoing depletion of groundwater across India and other...

A recent study, “Contextualizing Women’s Rights and Entitlements to Land: Insights from Gujarat”, by Meera Velayudhan, senior policy analyst, Centre for Environment and Social Research, published in “Social Change”, a Sage Publication, has said that lack of asset ownership has curtailed women‘s bargaining power in Gujarat, even as depriving them from the benefits of development programmes. This deprivation, it points out, is particularly evident when government schemes for development of land are scrutinized. “These schemes relate to irrigation, land development (watershed) or agricultural credit where possession of land is mandatory”, it says, citing the instance of a survey in Ahmedabad of a lift irrigation scheme requiring an average investment of Rs 12,000 to Rs 18,000, which revealed that 100 per cent beneficiaries in six schemes were men. The study underlines, “Since women lacked ownership of land in their namesake they are unable to gain benefits a major part of their expenditur...

A recent study, “Remittance Needs and Opportunities in India”, sponsored by GIZ, or the German Society for International Cooperation, and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), and carried out by Dr YSP Thorat and Dr Howard Jones, has found that formal financial institutions, including nationalized banks, may have taken take firms roots in Gujarat, but when it comes to serving the poor migrants seeking to transfer their remittances, these have failed to deliver. Estimating that “average annual remittance amount is about Rs 20,000”, the study says, even today, “informal remittance channels are pervasive and attractive due to the multiple functions they can serve.” In fact, on-the-spot survey of Rajasthani migrants in Gujarat suggests around 90% of the respondents “carry cash themselves or send it through others.” Pointing towards reasons, the study says, “Most migrants do not have bank account at the destination point where they are working. The migrants value...

Lack of information and data which analyze and document women’s participation in people’s movements remains a grey area at a time when their visibility during mass actions is found to be continuously increasing. Clearly, women’s participation has been on the upswing, and the latest example of this is the fight against the Bhechraji-Mandal special investment region (SIR), in which women made a big difference in the fight against efforts by the Gujarat government to go in for large-scale land acquisition in 44-odd villages, involving 55,000 hecteares. Thanks to women’s intervention, the movement forced the Gujarat government to denotify the SIR’s in 36 villages, confining it to just eight villages of the region. Women have similarly played an important role in the fight against the environmental destruction being cause to their respective regions by the Nirma cement plant near Mahua, the proposed nuclear power plant near Mithi Virdi, both in Bhavnagar district, and the Mundra special eco...

In an astounding revelation, two scholars, Anirban Mitra of the University of Oslo, and Debraj Ray of the New York University, have in their research paper, “Implications of an Economic Theory of Conflict: Hindu-Muslim Violence in India”, have found that “a one per cent increase in Hindu per-capita expenditure is predicted to decrease casualties (during communal violence) by anywhere between 3–7 per cent, while the same increase in Muslim per-capita expenditure increases casualties by 3–5 per cent.” While putting these findings in a perspective, the scholars reach the following conclusion: “The fact that Muslim expenditures display a significant and positive connection with later conflict, while Hindu expenditures have a negative link, suggests that Hindu groups have been largely been responsible for Hindu-Muslim violence in India.” The scholars clarify, “We do not mean to suggest that aggression is an intrinsic quality of Hindu groups while inevitable victimization is the lot of the M...

Despite huge claims by the Gujarat government about the positive impact of the 10-point programme on the migration process in the tribal areas of the state, recent expert observations as also research works on a district which is exclusively tribal, the Dangs, suggest that though the region may have received better infrastructure facilities, such as roads, the tribals’ livelihood issues remain unresolved like before. In one of the most recent observations, Janmejaya Mishra, an anthropologist by profession working with the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP), Ahmedabad, has shown how Dangs’ tribal population faced an “endangered livelihood”, with large number of them continuing to migrate like before. Giving the instance of a tribal named Kailash of Timerthava village in Subir area of the Dangs district, Mishra write in his  blog , this tribal has been migrating with his wife to Belanpur near Mandvi for last few years, and continues to do this even today. “He and his wife work ...

A recent Gujarat government report has identified Bharuch in Central Gujarat as the most hazard-prone district where what are called Major Accident Hazards (MAHs) can take place compared to the rest of Gujarat. The report, titled “Gujarat State Chemical Disaster Management Plan”, which has just been released, says that in Gujarat a total of 1,730 hazard-prone units have been identified, out of which 313 are in Bharuch, followed by Ahmedabad (287), Vadodara (261), Surat (165), and Valsad (137).Of the total number of industrial units with chemical hazard, Bharuch has the highest number of MAH units (75), followed by Vadodara (65), Kutch (35), Valsad (30), Ahmedabad (29), and Surat (26).

A recent study, carried out by the Centre for Social Research (CSR), Delhi, has said that majority of mothers who go in for becoming surrogate mothers are driven by two major reasons – poverty and unemployment. Carried out in three Gujarat districts, where Artificial Reproductive Technique (ATR) clinics flourish, Anand, Surat and Jamnagar, the study found that 86.7% of the respondents in Anand and 88.6% respondents in Surat said poverty drove them into surrogacy. As for Surat, to 91.4% of the respondents, unemployment was the main reason. The word surrogate means substitute. Which means a surrogate mother is the substitute for the genetic-biological mother. In common language, a surrogate mother is the person who is hired to bear a child, which she hands over to her employer at birth. In the past, surrogacy arrangements were generally confined to kith and kin of close relatives, family, or friends, usually as an altruistic deed. But, with the introduction of financial arrangements, sur...

A senior Jawaharlal Nehru University economist has calculated, on the basis of raw data obtained from the National Sample Survey Organisation’s on foodgrains consumption trend across the country during 2011-12, that Gujarat had the “highest leakage” of foodgrains from public distribution system (PDS) compared to most Indian states. The economist, who works as assistant professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, said, Gujarat has turned out to be the “worst performer as far as functioning of PDS is concerned is Gujarat”. He added, “The worst aspect of PDS performance in Gujarat is that it is now the state with the highest leakage in PDS in 2011-12: The figure rising from 45% in 2009-10 to 69% in 2011-12.”