Amidst fresh controversy over the Gujarat government’s decision to go ahead with the construction of Garudeshwar weir across the Narmada river, allegedly without environmental clearance, a top official in Gandhinagar Sachivalaya has confided to Counterview that the “real purpose of the weir is to supply Narmada water to the industrial complexes in the nearby regions, especially in Bharuch district.” The official, who did not want to be named, said, “The state-owned Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) has been asked to work out final details of the industrial areas that would need the water.”

  Even as Gujarat’s powerful babudom is gearing up for the high-profile stone laying ceremony on October 31, birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, for the so-called Statue of Unity, proposed as the tallest statue of the world, insiders close to chief minister Narendra Modi doubted if his idea of getting iron from farmers from all over the country in order to build its structure would ever succeed. A senior official, refusing to be named, suggested, even Modi believes that even the most ideal scenario it would not be possible to collect more than 700 tonnes of iron.

The Office of the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) for the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which is part of the World Bank group, has, in its fresh report, released on October 23, 2013, said that there is enough reason to believe in evidence provided by the Machimar Adhikar Sangharsh Sangathan (MASS), or the Association for the Struggle for Fishworkers’ Rights, regarding environmental and livelihood concerns of the people of Mundra, Kutch district, where the $4.14 billion dollar project the Tatas’ Ultra Mega Power Plant is being implemented. The concern is significant as the IFC is financing $450 million in the form of “a straight senior loan”. While welcoming the CAO report, MASS has said, “The findings reconfirm the concerns we raised since project construction started. CAO’s expert findings help bolster our fight to regain the damaged livelihoods of thousands of fishing families in Kutch coast.. It failed to account fisher people as project-affected people, to adequately ...

In a country that hardly produces world champions and Olympic medalists, Ahmedabad-based NGO group Drishti, which uses media and the arts to empower communities valuing their self-expression and human rights, has come up with a new documentary, “Googna Pahalvan”, highlighting the story of a man who, for the better part of his life, has been just that - a World Champion and a Deaflympics (Olympics for the Deaf) Gold Medalist. Drishti team has described the film (click  HERE  to see trailer) as “a story of grit, fierce dedication and hope”, adding it is “an attempt to make possible the dream of India’s most successful deaf athlete, his dream of making it to the Rio Olympics 2016.”

 Is the myth, woven around India Inc and their global partners, that Gujarat is the best “neo-liberal destination” to do business, offering better governance than most other states, is starting to wane? It would seem so, if one goes by the latest high-profile study sponsored by London-based DTZ, a multinational firm claiming to provide “integrated corporate real estate solutions and facilities management”, and Global Initiative for Restructuring Environment and Management (GIRED), India’s industry-led and industry-managed association, professing “a proactive role in improving infrastructural issues that many businesses are grappling with on a day to day basis.” In its latest report, “Top 21 Business Destinations Ranking”, Ahmedabad has been given an 8th ranking, way behind Indore, Bhubaneswar and Coimbatore, and Vadodara even worst – 14th. The research team – which included Shyam Sundar, Ramya R and Inayath Ulla Khan from GIREM, Rohit Kumar of DTZ, Ramesh Menon from Certes Realty L...

The saltpan workers, one of the most backward sections of Gujarat society, will soon start moving towards the Little Rann of Kutch in order to produce salt to eke a living in a harsh atmosphere. About 75 per cent of them belong what is called Nomadic and De-Notified Tribes (NDNT) in government registers, followed by scheduled castes or SCs (10 per cent) and scheduled tribes or STs (10 per cent). Belonging to 107 villages which dot villages on the districts bordering the Little Rann – Kutch, Banaskantha, Mehsana, Patan, Surendranagar and Rajkot — every year they move to the Rann to produce salt in October. According to the Agariya Hit Rakshak Manch (AHRM), an NGO which works among the saltpan workers, their movement, towards the Little Rann this year will start by the next week. While the saltpan workers, along with their families, will be back to their seasonal work by October-end, civil society activists working among them wonder if they will be provided with some of the basic facilit...

A new study being prepared by the Centre for Social Justice, Ahmedabad, “Economic Rights in India: Growing Distance from the Lower Judiciary”, has reached the drastic conclusion that the government’s modus operandi for “ensuring” socio-economic rights is to “pass a law and set up advisory bodies and an administrative chain of command to implement it”, but things fail to move because, often, “the same district official serves as the implementing and quasi-judicial body under a range of legislations.” The study, still in its draft stage, adds, “In the end, the claimant is faced with an over-burdened executive and a maze of bureaucratic red tape to traverse before she or he can contemplate approaching our equally backlogged higher judiciary.” Pointing to how “the same district official serves as the implementing and quasi-judicial body under a range of such legislations”, the study examines a few laws which have proved crucial for the people to obtain their rights. Analysing filed under t...

In a “critical discursive analysis”, two Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) scholars, Ankur Sarin and Swati Gupta, have found that strong biases exist among school principals of private schools against the weaker section (WS) of society. Based on a sample survey of private school principals of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka and Uttarakhand, the study, titled “Quotas under RTE: Leading towards an egalitarian education system?”, says, “Equality of opportunity appears to be outside the rationalities that well-meaning private school principals inhabit.” Pointing towards how 25 per cent quota for weaker sections in private schools – mandated by the Right to Education Act (RTE), 2009 – has “led to a resistance, which is justified in several ways”, the study says, this is happening at a time when “access to schooling for those coming of school age is close to becoming univ...

One of the major issues nagging civil society in Gujarat is that marginalized communities of the state are failing to get mobilized against land acquisition for industrial use, as in other states. A senior scholar, Prof Amita Shah, director, Gujarat Institute of Development Research (GIDR), Ahmedabad, has noted, “Whereas diversion (through acquisition or otherwise) of land from agriculture to other uses has generally been marked by protests, there have been situations where local communities have welcomed such developments.” In Gujarat, she adds, “resistance to diversion of land for industry-infrastructural development has, by and large, been fairly low or dormant – at least till recently.” To investigate the phenomenon, in her  research paper , “Mainstreaming or Marginalisation? Evidence from Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in Gujarat”, Prof Shah carried out a primary survey of households of seven villages from where land was obtained for the development of three SEZs – two each in ...

Investment projects under implementation A top expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foreign-policy think tank with centres in Washington DC, Moscow, Beirut, Beijing and Brussels, has strongly disputed those who tout Gujarat’s growth over the last decade as exemplary, saying whether it is foreign direct investment, overall investment in the economy, or governance, the state has been an average performer. Milan Vaishnav, associate, South Asia Programme, and previously with the Columbia University with primary research focus on the political economy of India, neither was there what the Gujarat chief minister called “pro-people good governance” nor “minimal government, maximum governance,” as he claimed before India’s largest business houses.

Anti-manual scavenging rally in Lakhtar, Gujarat Building toilets is a basic state duty, which governments, state or central, have failed to perform. Census of India data suggest that open defecation by 50 per cent of India’s population and nearly 40 per cent of “progressive” Gujarat suggests what has gone amiss. At a time when temples versus toilets controversy, first triggered by Union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh and then picked up by Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, appears no sign of receding, few have taken care of looking at the Census of India figures, which suggest that, in India, a little less than half of the population goes into the open for defecation because they have no access to toilet facilities, either public or private, suggesting how important basic social factors of governance are rated by the rulers in overall scheme of things. What is even worse is that in a “progressive” or “developed” state like Gujarat, nearly 40.4 per cent of the population d...

  Amidst raging controversy around whether Gujarat’s child malnutrition levels have actually gone down, with the Gujarat government vehemently denying a recent Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report that every third child in the state suffers from malnutrition, a recent research paper by one of the senior-most economists, Prof Arvind Panagariya of the Columbia University, has sharply contested the criterion of comparing India’s child malnutrition levels with those of Sub-Saharan African countries, which have much lower per capita incomes and poorer health indicators.

  Latest data made available from authoritative sources in Gujarat’s finance department have revealed something about which the state’s policy apparatus should be worried: A whopping 21 per cent of the annual plan allocation for the last financial year, 2012-13 remained “unspent” – or possibly diverted to the “non-plan” sector. As against non-plan expenditure, which is made of all the “necessary” expenditures which the Gujarat government must make, including payment to nearly six lakh government servants, interests on debts and other such obligations, annual plan allocation is made for satisfying the developmental needs of the state in fields as education, health, social justice, woman and child development, and amelioration of the backward areas.

Bardoligam, Chikhligam, Gandevigam and Adulgam are four villages situated on the fringe of the Golden Corridor between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, one of India’s most industrially developed zone. Yet, it is here that majority of poor, especially the most vulnerable sections among them, fail to get the social benefits they are entitled to, says senior Amsterdam-based scholar Jan Breman. In his recent study, “The Practice of Poor Relief in Rural South Gujarat”, Breman, emeritus professor of sociology, Amsterdam Institute for Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam, has suggested that, following Gharib Kalyan melas in the recent past, there has been a big talk about “a slow but steady decrease in poverty due to an accelerated pace of overall economic growth, is said to have marginally or even significantly reduced the vulnerability of people who have no other means of livelihood than their labour power.” However, the senior scholar, basing his study on four South Gujarat villages, has...

The jury at the hearing A preliminary report of the hearing at an independent tribunal on violence against Dalit women, organized by the All-India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch (AIDMAM) at the Constitutional Club, New Delhi, has called upon Dalit activists to work for creating awareness around new legislations that are now in place to fight against crimes against women, including the Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act, 2012 and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013. The jury of the tribunal, consisting of prominent human rights lawyers, scholars and activists – Farah Naqvi, Henri Tiphagne, Vrinda Grover, Gayatri Singh, Prof Vimal Thorat, Dr Srivella Prasad, P Sivakami and Vidyanand Vikal – said in their report that these laws should be urgently used alongside the Scheduled Caste/ Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (PoA Act), “so as to ensure quality justice to the victims of sexual violence.” During the two days of hearing, the jury heard 45 cases of atrocities a...