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...