Senior health rights activist Jagdish Patel of the Peoples Training and Research Centre (PTRC) has strongly protested against the manner in which a factory worker, Neeraj Kumar Singh, was treated by the Central government's Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) authorities after he met with an accident on July 30 in which he lost three fingers.
Working in Chopra Industries in Waghodiya, off Vadodara, Gujarat's cultural capital, Neeraj, aged 24, worked as a trainee, and is paid Rs 308 per day, from which his ESI contribution is deducted. As Waghodiya does not have ESI facilities, soon after he lost his fingers while running in a pressing machine, he had to be rushed to the ESI Hospital, Gotri, 25 km away.
From Gotri, he was sent to the Metro Hospital, and at At 1.30 am he was told that they couldn't treat him, and was again send back to Gotri's ESI Hospital, which referred to the Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad. Patel said, the ESI authorities provided him an ambula…

Addressing media in Delhi, Ambarish Rai, national convener of the Right to Education (RTE) Forum, commenting on the draft New Education Policy (NEP), has regretted “poor implementation of the RTE Act, 2009 despite nearly 10 years of its enforcement.” He said, public investment on education has been going down, and should immediately be “reversed” to at least 6% of GDP.
Welcoming the draft NEP, he said, inclusion of 3-18 years in the RTE Act “has been our long-standing demand”, but expressed disappointment over “increasing privatisation of education”, even as objecting to sharp reliance on corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds and philanthropic institutions.
Prof Muchkund Dubey, former chief secretary and president, Council for Social Development, said, while “elementary education is now a fundamental right”, increasing reliance of volunteers through programmes like Remedial Instructional Aids Programme (RIAP) and National Tutoring Programme (NTP) “will lead to informalisation o…

The National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information (NCPRI) has claimed that thousands of people have petitioned the President of India asking that he should not give his assent to the Right to Information (RTI) Amendment Bill, 2019, even as there were massive protests in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan and West Bengal.

National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI) leader Anjali Bhardwaj, in a public plea, has asked to concerned citizens, to send an appeal to the President of India, Ram Nath Kovind, asking him to “withhold his assent to the RTI Amendment Bill.” The appeal, she says, should be sent to secy.president@rb.nic.in and presidentofindia@rb.nic.in, with a copy it to saverti2019@gmail.com.
Text of the appeal says, the RTI Amendment Bill, 2019 “seeks to undermine people’s right to information”, adding, “No public consultations have been held on the amendments and the bill was not referred to any Parliamentary committee for detailed scrutiny.”
Asserting that Amendment Bill “is aimed at eroding the autonomy of information commissions, the final adjudicators under the RTI law”, the plea says, “Information Commissioners were guaranteed a fixed tenure under the RTI Act passed in 2005. The salaries, allowances and other terms of service of the Chief and information commissions of th…

While the Gujarat government’s Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board, set up in 2004, as of March 31, 2019, has collected a total cess of Rs 2,097.62 crore from the the builders, it has spent less than 10% -- Rs 197.17 crore. And, as on May 31, 2019, the total cess collection has reached Rs 2,583.16 crore, said a statement issued by Bandhkam Majur Sagathan general secretary Vipul Pandya.

The Supreme Court (SC) has disposed of Mumbai Municipal Corporation’s Special Leave Petition (SLP) challenging the Mumbai High Court’s (HC's) order which had directed the Maharashtra government to pay Rs 15,000 rent to Mahul residents so as to enable them to move out of Mahul.

Strongly protesting against the Central government’s plan to keep NREGA workers outside the purview of whatever floor level minimum wage is declared, the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha (NSM) has said that while the BJP government’s Wage Code bill in the Lok Sabha on July 24 2019 which would fix a national floor level minimum wage, the Rural Development Minister “has stated that NREGA wages will continue to be less than this national floor level minimum wage.”

The National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM) has said that Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar instead of taking a recent incident of mob lynching head on is indulging in "idle word play" at time his administration "is not serious about citizens' safety or in promoting a secular environment.

Responding to a national call for action by the Bhumi Adhikar Andolan (BAA), more than hundred protest demonstrations and public meeting were organised across the country on Monday, expressing their "disappointment" for the "shoddy" manner in which State governments and the Central government are dealing with the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA).

The National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM) has said that the proposed amendments to the Right to Information (RTI) Act is part of sinister attempts by the NDA Government to "arbitrarily push ahead regressive" changes in multiple pro-people legislations passed after protracted nation-wide struggles and consultative parliamentary processes when UPA was in power before 2014.
Calling it a move to "dilute" the RTI Act, "one of the most potent tools to ensure governmental accountability", NAPM said, the amendment would undermine the independence and autonomy of information commissions, which a matter of "grave concern."
Introduced in the Lok Sabha on July 19 "amidst a shroud of secrecy and there were no public consultations in this regard", one of India's topmost grassroots organizations said, the law’s passage in Parliament in 2005 was a victory and acknowledgement of the tireless efforts of peoples’ movements and campaigns …

The Bhumi Adhikar Andolan (BAA), a network of land rights movements across India, will be holding protests all over India against the eviction of forest dwellers on July 22, 2019, ahead of a crucial Supreme Court hearing two days later. The call for action is against the Supreme Court ruling of February 13, 2019 on eviction of millions of Adivasis and other traditional forest-dwelling communities, which was stayed for four months.
BAA said, a protest will also be organized in Delhi a protest demonstration will be held at Jantar Mantar, 12:00 noon onwards, adding, the decision for the action was taken as a two-day National Consultation of Land and Forest Rights Movements held in Delhi early this month, where it was decided to hold programmes and protest actions condemning government actions against forest dwellers and amendments to the Forest Act.
BAA further said, letters have already gone to chief ministers of different states seeking their intervention in favour of the Forest Righ…

Representatives of social movements from 16 states have decided at a national consultation to hold massive long marches and nationwide protests on August 9, the anniversary of Quit India movement, against electronic voting machines being used during the polls. To be bannered “EVMs Quit India! EVM Hatao – Desh Bachao – Ballot Paper Lao!”

The civil rights group, Financial Accountability Network (FAN), in a statement on the golden jubilee year of the nationalisation of banks, has demanded that the Government of India should bring back principles of mass banking, adding, "Strong measures should be taken to recover the non-performing assets (NPAs) of corporates", and willful defaulters should be "declared criminal offenders."

The Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), a Mumbai-based human rights organization currently taking up the cause of those who are being "wrongfully" declared foreigners in Assam, has said that "nearly 60 people have lost their lives and their deaths are connected to citizenship related issues" in the state.

Ahmedabad's civil rights organization, Nagrik Sashaktikaran Manch (NSM), has decided to launch 'Improve roads, Save lives' campaign on Sundays starting July 21 across different parts of the city for the next two months, reminding city authorities that the recent Kankaria incident, in which two persons died and 29 injured when the ride collapsed, was only a grim reminder to "the cost of negligence" on the part of those who had assigned business to the firm which operated it.

A Gujarat-based civil rights organization has demanded that the state assembly, currently in session in Gandhinagar, should come up with Minorities (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, on line with the anti-atrocities laws for scheduled castes and tribes. The decision was taken at a well-attended meeting of the Minority Coordination Committee (MCC) in the state capital.

In a major victory for India’s top fact-checking website, altnews.in, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) – a unit of the Florida-based Poynter Institute “dedicated” to bringing together fact-checkers worldwide to “support a booming crop of fact-checking initiatives by promoting best practices and exchanges in this field” – has set aside a complaint that it is violating IFCN’s nonpartisanship policy. The site altnews.in is a certified member of IFCN.

Suggesting that criminal -- politicians are being accepted in the Indian polity, the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and the National Election Watch (NEW), in a fresh analysis of Lok Sabha elections, have said that a whopping 132 (57%) out of 233 winners analysed with declared criminal cases won the polls with a vote share of 50% and above.

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has asked the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), the Government of India’s anti-pollution watchdog, to coordinate with State PCBs to make an assessment of compensation to be recovered from polluting units for the period of last five years, taking into account the cost of restoration and cost of damage to the public health and environment and the deterrence element.

In a sharply-worded attack on Union home minister Amit Shah, who is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most trusted Man Friday in the ruling establishment, top British weekly “The Economist” has said that the recent “rant” of the top politician calling immigrants from Bangladesh in Assam “termites” and “infiltrators” is not just “a standard bluster from a nativist politician railing against illegal immigration.”

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) has decided to hold a big gathering at Badwani, Madhya Pradesh, on the banks of river Narmada in order to highlight how even 34 years after the Narmada dam began being constructed about 30,000 families allegedly have not been rehabilitated, and thousands of houses, shops, temples and mosques in the Narmada valley are still in the danger of being submerged.

In a letter to the director, Gujarat Metro Rail Corporation (GMRC) and other officials of the GMRC, as also the Ahmedabad Municipal Commissioner and the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation mayor, senior state activist Jatin Sheth, convener, Nagrik Sashaktikaran Manch, has sought urgent intervention to ensure that the roads on which their contracting firms are working to lay down metro rail route in the city should be maintained on a day to day basis.

A civil society-sponsored statement, “strongly” condemning the CBI raids on July 11 on the office and residence premises of senior advocates Anand Grover and Indira Jaising of the Lawyers’ Collective in Delhi and Mumbai, has said that at a time when the matter is “under consideration by the High Court” such acts are “a blatant misuse of its agencies.”

Even as the Madhya Pradesh government has decided to reexamine all rejected (and perhaps pending) Forest Rights Act (FRA) claims, the threat to the claimants continues, a state-based civil rights organisation has claimed, citing how on July 9, 2019, at around 9-10 am forest officials accompanied by police and revenue officials started destroying newly planted fields of village Siwal of the Burhanpur district.

Reacting to the second report released by the UN on the human rights situation in both Indian-Administered Kashmir and Pakistan-Administered Kashmir, Aakar Patel, executive director, Amnesty International India, hss said that “India must pay heed to the UN reports and fulfil its obligations under international human rights law."

A UNESCO-sponsored report has sharply criticized Gujarat for failing to be disability-friendly towards children aged 5-19. The report says that all state rules for implementing the Right to Education Act, 2006, for instance, "provide for safe transportation to and from school for children with disabilities" with the exception of Gujarat and Uttarakhand.

“It is the case of fast track injustice by the court of law; very unfortunate”, Shweta Bhatt, the wife of jailed IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt told the media conference at the Press Club of India in Delhi, adding, “Because, he spoke truth before the Nanavati Commission about perpetrators of 200 Gujarat pogrom. It was the only reason for the Modi regime to target him.”

The Coordination Committee (MCC), a Gujarat-based civil rights organization, has regretted that the Union budget presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has "reduced" the total amount for minority welfare to Rs 2,508.78 crore for 2019-20compared to Rs 2,452.55 crore in the previous financial year.

UN human rights experts have urged the Government of India to prevent the "potential eviction" of up to nine million people, most of whom are "forest dwellers and members of scheduled tribes with an ancestral link to the land and forest." According to them, the threat of evictions follows a February 13 order of the Supreme Court.

The latest Business Inflation Expectations Survey (BIES), released by the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) has revealed that 54% of responses obtained from 1,600 companies say that in May 2019 there was increase in costs in May 2019 up by 3% from 50% reported in April 2019 during the last one year.

Condemning the arrest warrant issued against Stan Swamy, Aloka Kujur, Vinod Kumar, Rakesh Roshan Kiro and Babita Kashyap on June 19, 2019, in relation to FIR filed on July 26, 2018 for "waging war" against the state, sedition, conspiracy, and Sections 66 and 66A IT Act "based simply on their Facebook posts", the People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) has said it is "part of the continued wave of repressive measures" unleashed by government authorities.

The Minority Coordination Committee (MCC), a Gujarat-based civil rights organisation, will be holding a state-level conference to demand from the Gujarat government to come up with a separate legislation to prevent rising incidents of lynchings. Proposed to be called Minorities (Prevention of Atrocities) Bill, MCC will hold a meeting on July 18 in Gandhinagar with the participation of minority rights activists and experts.

In a surprise move, top pro-Modi economist Arvind Panagariya, who servedas first vice-chairman of the think-tank Niti Aayog between January 2015 and August 2017, has sharply criticized the 484 pages draft National Education Policy (NEP) 2019, released by the Government of India recently saying the proposal to set up the National Higher Education Regulatory Authority of India as an all-encompassing body that would stall reforms altogether.

A recent Reserve Bank of India report has noted that India’s domestic economy has hit a “soft patch in the last quarter of 2018-19 as private consumption, the key driver of GDP, turned weak.” Pointing out that the economic activity “weakened in the second half of 2018-19, with Q4:2018-19 recording 5.8 per cent growth in GDP”, the report says, this has brought down “the annual growth for 2018-19 to 6.8 per cent from the previous year’s 7.2 per cent.”

The National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL) has told Gujarat-based environmental organization, Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (PSS) that the detailed report of Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) representatives on their visit to Gujarat and Maharashtra assess the impact of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project on farmers is not its property, but that of JICA.