A new high-profile report supported, among others, by World Bank, has said that the Government of India estimate that the country’s urban population, 420 million or 33% of its total population in 2015, undervalues the “true extent” of urbanization in the country.

A high-profile report by New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), “Bound by Brotherhood: India’s Failure to End Killings in Police Custody”, has accused the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) for having “failed to ensure accountability in custodial deaths” in India.

  In a revelation which is likely to create ripples among Hindutva advocates, a top US research organization, Pew International, has said that Hindus may have made “substantial educational gains in recent decades”, yet the fact is, they “have the largest educational gender gap of any religion in the world”.

  A just-published study has revealed the Government of India (GoI) has not been supporting litigations arising from violating National Biological Diversity (DB) Act, 2002, pointing towards how the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), the country’s watchdog for implementing the Act, has been at the “receiving end” for most of the litigations.

Groundwater at an irrigation farm A recent Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) report has found that groundwater of villages near Vadodara, known as Gujarat’s cultural capital, is highly polluted due to “industrial activity”, mainly because of what it calls “unscientific disposal of hazardous waste water” into the effluent treatment channel.

It was August first week, 1985. Strictly speaking, this my first foreign trip. Earlier, in late 1960s, I had been to Nepal in a school tour, but that was hardly foreign. I was sent to Havana by my bosses in “Patriot”, the former Delhi-based pro-Soviet daily, to cover world indebtedness conference, called by Cuba’s supreme leader Fidel Castro. This was my first assignment; the effort, apparently, was to ascertain if I could be transferred to the news bureau from the desk. A semi-communist then, I held Castro in high esteem, and I was actually quite excited. Hardly a photographer, I even carried with me to Havana a heavy Nikon SLR, which my maternal uncle, settled in US – Bharat Kinariwala, 90, professor-emeritus at Hawaii University – had given me. I had hardly put to it any use till then. I was sure, I would be able to click some photographs of Castro, which I proudly did, after borrowing a zoom lens from a reluctant photographer in the press gallery. Castro threw a huge party for hun...

  Setting aside fears of large-scale submergence in Madhya Pradesh, top Gujarat government insiders have authoritatively stated that the crucial permission to close down the gates of the Narmada dam will surely be obtained by June 2017, ahead of the monsoon season, in order to store as much water as possible during the rainy season up to the full reservoir level, 138.64 metres.

Did Prime Minister Narendra Modi go ahead with demonetisation of Rs 500 and 1000 notes without allowing any expert analysis of the impact it might have on the economy? It would seem so, if a recent paper by a research team attached with a Union finance ministry outfit is any indication.

  A high-profile report prepared to mark the World Pneumonia Day (November 12) by a well-known US-based institute has revealed that, over the last year, there is an increase, albeit marginal, in the number of under-five deaths among children because of pneumonia and diarrhea.

  Motilal Oswal , one of India’s topmost financial services firms, has predicted that the economic growth of the economy is likely to slow down in the second half of 2017, and is unlikely to improve in the next one year because of demonetization of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes. In a sector update, it  says , “Overall, while economic growth in the second half of 2017 could be lower than expected, fundamentals of the economy should improve from the second half of 2018.”

Top ten states in ease of doing business The Government of India’s latest inter-state comparison may have humbled Gujarat to No 3 position in ease of doing business, from the No 1 it enjoyed a year ago. However, what should be even more disconcerting to state policy makers is, of the 10 reform categories examined for ease of doing business, Gujarat ranks No 1 just in one. Equally, the assessment, carried out by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), Government of India, in partnership with the World Bank, finds that of the 10 categories examined, Gujarat ranks in the first five positions in just two reform categories –access to land and in commercial disputes resolution enablers.

  A new report, “Thermal Coal in Asia – Stopping the Juggernaut”, by top international energy consultants, Energy Transition Advisors Pty Ltd, has raised the alarm that India’s fossil fuel subsidies, especially those related with coal, remain a major hurdle in the country’s contribution to achieving climate change target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees centigrade.

"Netaji: Living Dangerously" released in Ahmedabad Senior journalist Kingshuk Nag’s "investigation" into the mystery around Subash Chandra Bose’s death in his  book  “Netaji: Living Dangerously” – whose second edition was released in Ahmedabad on Monday – has revealed that “in all probability Bose was held in a gulag, the massive system of forced labour camps found in Siberia during the time of Stalin.”

  In a glaring instance of how Prime Minister Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, continued justifying the 2002 communal riots more than two months after they began, retired DGP RB Sreekumar has recalled, Modi told him in a one-to-one conversation in that violence by Hindus after the February 27 Godhra train burning was “a natural and uncontrollable reaction and no police could control and contain it.”

Undernourished population (%) among BRICS nations An India  case study , supplementing the report “2016 Global Hunger Index (GHI)”, which ranks India 97th in GHI among 118 countries, has regretted that “by contrast, Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa, all of whom share the BRICS high table with India, have a single-digit score” in undernourishment.

Suresh Mehta It was February 2011. I was in the Gujarat state assembly, covering routine House proceedings. Mostly boring, as after sitting for the whole day, I wouldn’t get a story worth reporting, except for the usual BJP-Congress duels, which seemed to be happening more according to a written script. On one of these days, a good friend, Mahinder Jethmalani, running Pathey Budget Centre, a small state budget analysis centre in Ahmedabad, reached up to me with a colourful four-page folder. It was the summary of a report prepared by the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), Delhi, which qualified Gujarat as the most transparent of the 10 states had it surveyed. Titled “Transparency in State Budgets in India”, it gave a score of 61.7 to Gujarat for budget transparency, as against the average of 51.6 for the 10 states it surveyed. The score of other state was Madhya Pradesh (60.2), Andhra Pradesh (51.8), Chhattisgarh (56.1), Odisha (52.6), Assam (51.1), Jharkhand (48.4)...

  The World Bank wants India to urgently rework its methodology of estimating poverty, more "compatible" with international estimates, saying if it does so, it “would eventually lead to a substantial downward revision of the poverty numbers in India” – from 21.2 per cent to nearly half of it, about 12.4 per cent, as worked out for the period 2011-12.

  Revati Laul , an independent journalist who is writing a book about the 2002 Gujarat riots, has made it know how she is being meticulously shadowed for the last 18 months during her investigation into the massacre that took place 14 years ago through the eyes of three men who were part of a riotous mob. Laul is known to have been  attacked  by a 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre convict in January during her probe in Ahmedabad.

Score of 13 Gujarat districts out of 53 chosen for survey A Government of India report has ranked Ahmedabad 43rd in its cleanliness survey of 53 districts it has selected for the purpose. Worse, Ahmedabad, which is desperately  seeking  world heritage tag from UNESCO, ranks poorer than all but one of the 13 districts chosen from Gujarat out of 53.

All figures in % of GDP A new study by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), “World Cities Report 2016: Urbanization and Development – Emerging Futures” has regretted extremely low levels of “aggregate municipal expenditures in India”, which happen to be of the worst in the world.

  Amidst All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB)  justifying  polygamy, saying it “meets social and moral needs and the provision for it stems from concern and sympathy for women”, facts suggest the the practice is down from 5.7 per cent of Muslim families in 1961 to 2.55 per cent in 2006.

Modi addressing IAS probationers in Feb 2015 A new study by a top Washington DC-based think tank, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has sought to give thumbs up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent review of the negative performance of IAS bureaucrats who have completed 30 years in service, with 13 of them “compulsorily retired” in 2015-end for their “unsatisfactory performance.”

Modi aide and Niti Ayog vice-chairman Panagariya's tweet Top aides of Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have  declared , on the basis of the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2016, that India shows an improvement of 15 points in a year, suggesting it's a huge success in strategy to encourage innovation. However, ironically, most of the GII score is based on data collected in 2014 or earlier.

Modi, Saurabh Patel, Mukesh Ambani In a surprise move, Saurabh Patel, long considered the most industry-friendly face, has failed to find place in the new Cabinet. There is no official explanation why Saurabh, who was in charge of three most important portfolios as the Cabinet minister of finance, industry and energy and petrochemicals, was humbled.

You can be a frank and an approachable leader, but is that enough for you to solve social issues which bog society? Soon after Vijay Rupani became Gujarat chief minister on August 5 evening, a top Sachivalaya insider, whom I have known for more than a decade, phoned me up to know what people thought of “the new incumbent”. Hesitant, I told him that he knew Rupani for quite some time, in fact ever since Rupani was in the Rajkot Municipal Corporation, hence he should know better. Refusing to be named, he didn’t mince words, “Rupani is frank, approachable, dynamic”, adding, “It has always been a boon to work with him.” I have known Rupani a little bit, though certainly not as much as this insider, who keeps a close tab of what’s goings on in the nerve centre of Gujarat politics. Without any doubt, Rupani is “approachable”. Off and on, while covering Sachivalaya, I would consult him about political goings on around Modi, and though he was frank and approachable, he never crossed the BJP’s ...

Vijay Rupani with Nitin Patel Setting aside wild speculations running for the last two days that Nitin Patel, known for his rough-and-tough ways, would become chief minister, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has chosen his well-known protege, Vijay Rupani, to succeed Anandiben Patel, who resigned on a Facebook post early this week.

Jignesh Mevani While agitations may have rocked Gujarat's urban and semi-urban areas against cow vigilantes in Una violently thrashing four Dalits belonging to the Rohit sub-caste after tying them with SUV on July 11, questions are beginning to be raised about their sustainability.

  In an astounding revelation, 14 years after the horrendous communal flare-up in Gujarat, in which at least 1,000 people died and nearly one lakh got displaced, about 3,000 families still living in irregular rehabilitation colonies are facing hostility from several well-known Muslim NGOs which had initially helped them.

  In a shocking revelation, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has found that the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB), the state government’s powerful anti-pollution watchdog, does not consider agate industry hazardous. It regrets, “As such, GPCB is not having any data regarding omission of silica dust in agate work.”

  Amidst controversy surrounding flogging of four Dalits belonging to the Rohit (chamar) community for eating the beef a dead cow continues unabated, a top  blogging site  has published excerpts of a 1989  paper  by a senior Vienna-based sociologist, who highlights how the despicable practice in Gujarat was related with the perception that cattle scavengers “remove the impurity attached to the carcass and transfer it to themselves.”

Gujarat CM talking to an Una Dalit victim on July 20 Dalits across Gujarat, especially in Saurashtra, may have agitated against the July 11 incident, when four youths belonging to the Rohit (chamar) sub-caste were violently beaten up with iron rods after being tied with SUV, first in village Mota Samadhiyala and then in Una town of south Saurashtra.

  A high-profile report prepared by the Boston Consulting Group, US, has suggested that India may have progressed well in the economic indicator (which consists of income, economic stability and employment), and investment (instructure, health and education), but its progress in sustainability (income equality, civil society, governance and environment) remains below world average.

Amidst the recent Dalit agitation in Gujarat in the wake of the July 11 attack on four Dalit youths belonging to the Rohit (chamar) community off Una for skinning a dead cow, I decided to find out what would be the impact of the incident, already a national issue, on Gujarat politics. Apart from immediately getting in touch with some senior Dalit rights activists, I contacted a few senior BJP and Congress leaders, too. The reason I did this was, one of my friends, who happens to be a senior activist, Ashok Shrimali, a Dalit, would always tell me how, over the years, and especially after the 2002 riots, “80 per cent of the Dalits have moved away from the Congress to the BJP”. While a few other non-political Dalit activists would vehemently deny this, I decided to go by the observation of Teesta Setalvad, who said in a recent article, “Dalits and the Hindu Rashtra: A Close Look at the Gujarat Model”: “As we saw in 2002, it is Dalits who have been used and abused to carry out the filthy d...

  Tracking patients suffering from silicosis over the last four years in Madhya Pradesh's Alirajpur, Jhabua and Dhar, a state-based non-government organization (NGO) has said in a new report that a total of 589 people have died in 105 villages of the three districts because of the deadly disease in 2015. The report was finalized in April 2016.

  Rural areas in the downstream of the Narmada dam in the Bharuch district of Gujarat have been in the midst of one of the worst environmental disasters. Massive sea water intrusion from the Bay of Khambhat, for upto 40 kilometres eastwards into the Narmada has allegedly “destroyed” 10,000 hectares of agricultural land.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have “cleared” his views on BJP’s maverick politician Subramaniam Swamy. However, whatever I know of Modi as chief minister of Gujarat during my nearly 15 year stint in Gandhinagar as the Times of India correspondent, it wasn’t at all surprising the way he reacted. His “critique” of Swamy, if it all it can be called that, came after Reserve Bank of India Raghuram Rajan had decided to quit and return to the academia in Chicago. So, was Swamy “used and abandoned”, to quote a phrase used by Gujarat’s top cop GL Singhal in the “Gujarat Files”, a book based on stings by journalist Rana Ayyub to “expose” government role in 2002 riots and fake encounters? In fact, any reference of Swamy as a “maverick” would remind me of a Gujarat-based maverick politician, with whom I had, I must admit, an uneasy relationship. Looking back, I sometimes feel it was perhaps a mistake on my part to be ill at ease with this IPS-turned-politician, who had been a Cabinet minister u...

  A high-level committee, appointed by the Government of India soon after Narendra Modi took over reins of power in 2014, has recommended that the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) should “relax” mining coastal environmental norms for “developmental purposes.”

Global index ranking. Column B: 2016, Column C: 2015 A recent report by top British consultants, AT Kearney, with branches all over the world, has suggested that Indian cities have far to go in case they wish to become smart. Titled “Global Cities 2016 ”, the consultants seek to answer the question: “Which global cities are performing best today, which have the best long-term potential, and what makes a smart city?”

Knowledgeable sources in the Gujarat government, citing information they had received from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), have said that the US-based philanthropic organization, Ford Foundation, has been formally conveyed that all restrictions placed on it under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) by the Government of India have been “removed”, and it could freely operate as a registered NGO in India.

  A recent  study , “Millennial Careers: 2020 Vision - Facts, Figures and Practical Advice from Workforce Experts”, has found that, among those who had achieved adulthood around the year 2000, Indians top the list of doing work for the longest hours than all other countries surveyed.

A recent study on how corporate social responsibility (CSR) is being used for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship programme, Swacch Bharat Mission (SBM) has revealed that, despite “a vast body of research” showing that individual attitudes are the “key reasons for high open defecation rates” in India, “only 20% of companies reported integrating behaviour change into their programmes.

  A new World Bank study, released ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi completing two years in office, has said that the India’s national poverty rates fell much more sharply between 2005 and 2012, when the UPA government ruled the country, compared the decade between 1994 and 2005.

A top water resources expert, Shripad Dharmadhikary, has said in a recent paper that, taking advantage of a “flawed” policy perspective, continuing since independence, that river waters should not be allowed to “go waste” into the sea, India's powerful elite has been seeking to increasingly divert waters for industrial purpose.

I have in my hand a new book, “Business Interests and the Environmental Crisis”, edited by two scholar-activists whom I have known for a little while for their insightful reports on ground-level environmental issues and their implications – Kanchi Kohli and Manju Menon. While I found most of the papers published in the book (published by Sage) too theoretical, hence would possibly require expert reaction, two of them interesting me. The first one is a paper by Shripad Dharmadhikary, a passionate expert on river systems, once associated with the Narmada Bachao Andolan. What interested me in Dharmadhikary’s paper is his strong, perhaps unique, argument on how the Narmada project was conceived to put into practice the “flawed” notion that water should not be allowed to go waste into the sea, and how this concept has ruined ecological systems. The second paper that interested me is by Himanshu Burte, faculty at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Burte deals with Ahmedabad’s Sab...

The Government of India, at least its Ministry of Women and Child Development, does not seem to think that there is anything to celebrate about implementation of the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) scheme in Gujarat,  launched  by Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the historic battleground of Panipat in Haryana on January 22, 2015.

Modi launching Beti Bachao Beti Padhao in January 2015 The Government of India, at least its Ministry of Women and Child Development, does not seem to think that there is anything to celebrate about implementation of the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) scheme in Gujarat,  launched  by Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the historic battleground of Panipat in Haryana on January 22, 2015.

Ever since the controversy – if can be called that – broke out last year about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BA and MA degrees, I had been informally telling some of those involved in questioning his educational qualifications, including Ahmedabad-based political activist Roshan Shah and a few scribes, that, what I know for sure is, he was an MA student in Gujarat University. I am naming Roshan – whom I have found to be a fine person with good insights into local Gujarat issues, and a keen campaigner against Modi and Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel on social media (something Modi’s opponents utterly lack) – because he was a kingpin in raising this and similar such controversies, citing RTI pleas and complaints. Not that doubts about Modi’s educational qualifications did not exist earlier. They did exist even in my mind after he became Gujarat chief minister. Yet, these doubts seemed to have got cleared, when during an informal gathering, I asked Dinesh Shukla, a veteran retired...