By Rajiv Shah
In a controversial assertion, top legal expert Upendra Baxi has sought to question India's Constitution makers for neglecting human rights and social justice. Addressing an elite audience in Ahmedabad, Prof Baxi said, the constitutional idea of India enunciated by the Constituent Assembly tried to resolve four key conflicting concepts: governance, development, rights and justice.

By Rajiv Shah
A well-attended Dalit rights meet under the banner “14 Pe Charcha” (discussion on Article 14 of the Indian Constitution), alluding to Prime Minister Narendra Modi well-known campaign phrase of the 2014 Parliamentary elections, “chai pe charcha” (discussion over cup of tea), organized off Ahmedabad, has resolved on Wednesday to hold a 14 kilometres-long rally on April 14 to oppose the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), enacted on December 10-11.

By Rajiv Shah
An influential Delhi NGO has told the powerful Gujarat-based industrial house Nirma that it should come up with a public statement stating it is not using nonylphenol, a “disrupting chemical” commonly used to manufacture detergents, which the NGO claims is “a persistent, toxic, bioaccumulative chemical” that acts as a “hormone disruptor” and can be responsible for a number of "adverse human health effects”, including cancer.

By Rajiv Shah
Even as suggesting a series of measures to push out the Indian economy from the current “great slowdown”, well-known economist Arvind Subramanian has advised the Government of India (GoI) to urgently set up a committee under the leadership of Nobel Prize winner Professor Abhijit Banerjee in order to trigger the process of “generating and disseminating accurate data.”

By Rajiv Shah
A few days back, when I met Prof Krishna Kumar in Ahmedabad, a prominent scholar on education, whom I have considered over the last two decades more as the main brain behind Prof Yash Pal’s well-known report "Learning without Burden" (1993), I just couldn’t resist recalling my interactions with him as a BA (honours) English student in Kirori Mal College in Delhi. Prof Kumar was in Ahmedabad to deliver a lecture on why our education system was failing to succeed. It was an Umashakar Joshi memorial lecture.

By Rajiv Shah
A Government of India report, released last month, has suggested that “model” Gujarat has failed to make any progress vis-à-vis other states in ensuring that girls continue to remain enrolled after they leave primary schools. The report finds that, in the age group 14-17, Gujarat’s 71% girls are enrolled at the secondary and higher secondary level, which is worse than 20 out of 22 major states for which data have been made available.

By Rajiv Shah
A recent report, published a top American think-tank based in Washington DC, the Pew Research Center, has found India faring poorest among the 25 most populous countries across the world in social hostilities index (SHI), which seeks to analyse 13 different issues related with social tensions arising out of religious discord and violence.

By Rajiv Shah
This is in continuation of my previous blog where I had quoted from a commentary which top economist Prof Kaushik Basu had written in the New York Times (NYT) a little less than a month ago, on November 6, to be exact. He recalled this article through a tweet on November 29, soon after it was made known that India's growth rate had slumped (officially!) to 4.5%.