Open Forum

A blogging site carries an interesting article, "4 African Kings Who Ruled India That Have Been Erased From History". Two Ghana bloggers ( Koby PI and MR Eris ), apparently, are owners of the site, which calls itself “Mind Builders Fellowship", which, it says, is an organization that helps each and everyone to liberate oneself by "renewing of the mind and flashing out the unwanted elements out of the mind.”

The recent unfortunate, highly deplorable, brutal and heinous incident of rape, body mutilation, murder and burning of a young Dalit girl in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh reveals the sickening neglect of the political community as well as of the society to reinforce caste, gender and power dynamics in the country. In light of this, the Gender Impact Studies Center (GISC) at Impact and Policy Research Institute (IMPRI), Counterview, GenDev Centre for Research and Innovation, City Makers Mission International and Delhi Post News organized a Special Talk with Mr Martin Macwan, an eminent Dalit Rights Activist as part of its #WebPolicyTalk – The State of Gender Equality: #GenderGaps on October 21, 2020, titled “The Heinousness of many Hathras amid the Pandemic – Voluntarism, the Way Ahead for Combating Caste and Gender-based Violence”. An IMPRI note: *** Mr Macwan raised pertinent points that the victim of sexual violence was deprived of her right to be respectfully cremated. Her body was instead

Pramod Ranjan*  makes prediction of what people would think post-pandemic phase: *** It is said that had the spread of the Novel Coronavirus not been contained by imposing lockdowns, by now, it would have consumed a substantial chunk of the human residents of the earth. But is the truth as one-sided as is being claimed? Lockdown killed lakhs of persons the world over and its after-effects have ruined the economies of scores of low- and middle-income countries like India. Crores of persons have been condemned to a life of poverty and misery. What is going to change Offices and educational institutions were a gift of the modern age. By bringing human minds together, the places of work and the centres of education not only scripted a new chapter in the development of the human race but also brought diverse communities on common platforms. It is almost certain that in the post-Covid world, schools and offices would not exist as we know them today. A new law for bringing about changes in

In August 2020, Global March Against Child Labour released an evidence-based report , providing an overview of the situation of child labour with a gender lens in sugarcane harvesting in India. The report highlights that children are pushed into hazardous child labour due to structural poverty among harvesters, most of whom are from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, also referred to as DBA (Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi/Tribal) in this article, because of exploitative hiring practices resulting in debt bondage. It was found that traditional gender-based norms contributed significantly to child labour by normalising unequal wages and unpaid family work. This article by Gazal Malik and Kratika Choubey* is an extension to the report, focusing on the facets of gender and caste as cross-cutting issues to be kept in mind while addressing the problem of child labour in sugarcane supply chain and in other agricultural crops in India: *** Caste, Poverty and Child Marriage

COVID-19 induced lockdown is a voluntary cessation of economic activity, Prof Arun Kumar, one of India’s most eminent economist, said while addressing the audience in a Distinguished Lecture #WebPolicyTalk organized by Impact and Policy Research Institute (IMPRI), New Delhi on Socio-Economic Impact of Coronavirus Pandemic in India held on October 7, 2020. Prof Kumar is Malcolm S. Adiseshiah Chair Professor, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi and former Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi and is known for his works on Indian economy, black money and policy issues. An IMPRI note: Referring to lockdown scenarios of empty roads, decline in consumption of petrol and diesel by more than 30% and drastic fall in air and water pollution, he said everything came to a standstill barring the meagre movement of essentials. He stated that if lockdown would not have been imposed then it would have caused higher mortalities than the current rate due to inadequate medical facil

Development and Cooperation, a website produced on behalf of a German institute, Engagement Global, with the aim to discuss international-development affairs and explores how they relate to other fields of policy-making, recently published an interview with Nandini Sundar, professor of sociology, Delhi School of Economics, where the academic seeks to answer when why, around the world, forest areas tend to be haunted by violent conflict, in the context of India.

By Gazala Paul, Pankaj Mishra* When 14 families from areas surrounding Chorbhatti village under Bodla block in Kawardha district of Chhattisgarh decided to settle down at Amlidih hamlet in 2002, their status was slightly better than non-citizens. Devoid of primary documents such as voter identity, ration and job cards, besides land-related papers, the Baiga families, who belong to the Particularly Vulnerable Tribe Groups, neither had access to government schemes nor did they possess any rights. They eked out a living from ‘nature’s gifts’ they collected from a nearby forest. It took 12 years before 40-year-old Asdu Singh Baiga and his family could assert some degree of rights and entitlements thanks to the intervention by Samerth Trust, an Ahmedabad-based NGO which started its activities in Chhattisgarh as far back as 2006. Samerth took up a host of projects, each tied to the other, but primarily focused on access to water. “We believed at the time that access to water often opens up a

By Mirai Chatterjee* Bharti is a bidi worker from Madhya Pradesh who had never heard of insurance till the COVID-19 pandemic. She is a front-line health worker serving her neighbourhood by providing life-saving health information. She took microinsurance coverage for the first time ever for health and also for loss of income due to illness. She got sick, tested positive for corona virus and was hospitalised. She put in her claim and obtained Rs 25,000 towards hospitalisation expenses and Rs 3900 for loss of income. Ayesha is a small farmer in a village near Ahmedabad. During the second lock down, her husband Javed, had a heart attack and passed away. She had been taking microinsurance coverage for the last fifteen years. Her son sent all the documents by WhatsApp and the claim was processed online with Rs 35,000 directly deposited in her bank account. She said that at her time of loss and sorrow, this was some support to her and her children. Both Bharti and Ayesha were fortunate enoug

Reproduced below is the executive summary of the “Exporting Corruption Progress Report 2020: Assessing Enforcement of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention”, with Gillian Dell as lead author, published by Transparency International , a global movement with the claimed vision of having a world in which government, business, civil society and the daily lives of people are free of corruption: ***

By Chaitanya Iyer* In May 2020, OpenAI, a California based Artificial Intelligence (AI) research company, first described its new AI language-generating system called GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3). Since then, hundreds of media outlets have written about the system and its capabilities. Social Media has been abuzz about its power and potential. The Guardian even carried an op-ed piece entitled “ A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? ” All this hype around GPT-3 made me intrigued. So I decided to put it to the test. But there was a slight hindrance to my plan, I could not get my hands on GPT-3 as it is only accessible through a private beta, so I used the next best thing available – GPT2. The prompt I gave to the text generator was “Write a passage on procrastination in about 400 words” and it came up with this: “Stop Procrastination Before It Stops You Don’t be that person who puts things off. Part of getting better is knowing your triggers and no