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Showing posts from January, 2015

Golana: Price for justice... when Darbars wanted to teach Dalits lifetime lesson

Paying homage to victims at Golana By Gagan Sethi*  Eight years of continuous engagement, which included setting up of forestry cooperatives and conscientisation work among the youth, helped us infuse a sense of confidence and self-respect among the Vankar Dalits of Golana village, situated off Bay of Khambhat. Thanks to these efforts, the community had begun to stand up for its rights. It had begun to identify the entitlements the Dalits should get and also how they were deprived of their rights because the existing socio-political setup. An application for allocating land had been sent to the mamlatdar of Cambay, as Khambhat was called then. It was the same land that had been encroached upon by the upper caste Darbars of the village. In official records, it was a government land, set aside for housing for the weaker sections. The mamlatdar acted in favour of the Dalits. He did this despite political pressure. We believe he had orders from the then Kheda district collector, Ravi Saxen

Geotechnical, geological studies on Sardar Statue site raise serious issues

Several senior activists and intellectuals, including Trupti Shah, Girish Patel, Mahesh Pandya, Ghanshyam Shah, Persis Ginwalla, Rohit Prajapati, Himanshu Thakkar, Nandini Oza, Prasad Chacko, Shripad Dharmadhikary, and others have asked the Secretary, Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change,Government of India, to immediately halt of all activities related the Statue of Unity project, proposed in the memory of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in the midst of Narmada River, about 3.2 km downstream of Sardar Sarovar Dam, or face legal action. Text of the letter: We were expecting after our letter dated July 17, 2014 that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Rashtriya Ekta Trust (SVPRET) and the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd (SSNNL) would appoint a consultant to conduct the requisite Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the project known as Statue of Unity. We are shocked to know that this process, required under environmental laws, has not been carried out, nor have you taken any of the

Despite Kanya Kelavni, Gunotsav even Bimaru states perform better than Gujarat

By Rajiv Shah  The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) report, released by well-known non-profit organisation Pratham on January 13, 2015, has once again revealed extremely poor educational standards of Gujarat. Instead of showing any improvement, Pratham surveyors found them to be progressively declining, despite the annual Gunotsav festival for improving the quality of education in the state, going on for the last several years. ASER further found that things are no better with regard to girl child education in rural Gujarat, sought to be promoted through the Kanya Kelavni enrollment drive every year. Based on an analysis of the data it collected across all the 26 districts (increased to 33 last year), the data suggest that, while Gujarat may be doing quite well in providing basic school infrastructure – water, sanitation, school buildings etc. – when it comes to infusing human resources in the schools, the state’s lag is quite evident vis-a-vis even poor states like Bihar, Chha

Stereotypes: It’s all in the mind... Our cultural invasion and Adivasis' gender perceptions

By Gagan Sethi* Before we would begin working in a village following our “mandatory reconnaissance and trust-building visits”, normally, we would summon village community representatives, about 30 of them, to Ahmedabad for a 10 day training camp. In most cases, only men would turn up for training. The training camp would be held at the St Xavier’s College campus, where the Behavioral Science Centre was located. It was recently renamed as Human Development Research Centre (see photo). In the camp, we would normally get representations from cross section of the community in which we worked. We ensured that if there were elders, there were equal number of youths (“juvarniyas, we called them) as well. And if there were small and marginal farmers, there should also be landless workers. But we were never successful in getting many women to the training camps. If at all, they had to be brought separately, and not with men. Often, we would had to make arrangements for their training camps in o

Equality a far-fetched idea: Casteism prohibits normal persons to access public spaces

By Gagan Sethi*   In Golana village of Central Gujarat, the Dalit hamlet, known as Vankar Vas, was getting overcrowded. Families were growing, and the 100-odd households in the Vas now had grown up children, some of whom had married. Almost every household had two families living in one room plus the outer courtyard. Blame it on overcrowding; family quarrels had become pretty common. The year was 1984. With the cooperative now generating regular income for the Vankars who were its members, the young Turks of the Vas began pressuring the elders, called mahetars, to negotiate with upper caste Darbars, who controlled the panchayat, to allocate some common village land for housing. However, Dalit’s claiming such a right, especially when elders knew that a big portion of the panchayat controlled common village land was encroached upon by few powerful Darbar families, was blasphemy. The matter came up for discussion at a cooperative meeting, and those of us from the NGO who were working for