काउंटरव्यू

An email alert received by me from a 2020 batch alum of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM)-Indore has forwarded a mail received by this person regarding "concerns of the current students towards the top business institute's Indore branch's authorities' alleged "disregard" towards the management of the Covid-19-related situation on-campus.

  An email alert received by me from a 2020 batch alum of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM)-Indore has forwarded a mail received by this person regarding "concerns of the current students towards the top business institute's Indore branch's authorities' alleged "disregard" towards the management of the Covid-19-related situation on-campus. The email alert states, "I am writing this to you on behalf of students who do not wish to disclose their names fearing administrative action. I request you to respect their and my request for complete  anonymity in this disclosure." This is what the e-mail alert says: *** This disclosure is with reference to the "The Ken" article that highlights the abuse of administrative power in the midst of a covid-19 outbreak at IIM Indore. I am writing this to bring to light the present conditions and abuse of administrative power that is happening at IIM Indore in the midst of a Covid-19 outbreak on the c

By Moin Qazi* Mhaswad village is a mere blip on India’s vast geographic radar but it shines brightly on the country’s development landscape. Women here are seeding a digital revolution that is enabling financial security and well-being for low-income women in remote villages Located in the rain shadow region of Satara district, Maharashtra’s sugar bowl, Mhaswad faces perennial drought and agrarian distress. However, a unique movement involving several thousand women has quietly made the development landscape greener. The movement began with the Mann Deshi Foundation in 1996 and was started by a trained economist Chetna Sinha who combined her intellect with her passion for rural uplift. She used local villages as crucibles for some of the most revolutionary experiments in social innovation and entrepreneurship. Run entirely for and by women, the Foundation has so far reached out to four lakh rural women. Mann Deshi’s field leaders have been able to uncover deep and varied nuances of pov

By Dr Gurinder Kaur* Earth Hour is observed on March’s last Saturday every year in almost all countries of the world to make people aware about natural disasters due to climate change and their prevention. Earth Hour, an international event, is an hour long “light off” event. Excessive and non-essential use of outdoor artificial light, is affecting human health, wildlife behaviour and our ability to observe stars and other celestial objects. It is going to be celebrated on March 27th, 2021 this year between 8.30 pm to 9.30 pm local time for an hour by turning off non-essential lights in homes, businesses and government establishments. As many as 2.2 million people celebrated Earth Hour for the very first time in 2007 in Sydney, Australia on March 31 from 7.30 pm to 8.30 pm by turning off non-essential lights in their homes. The city of San Francisco in the United States of America also joined the Earth Hour campaign in October 2007 by turning off the non-essential lights for an hour. E

By Venkatesh Nayak*  The Annual Report of the Central Information Commission (CIC) for the year 2019-2020 is out in the public domain. Readers will recall, presenting such a report to Parliament about the action taken by public authorities every year, to implement this transparency law, is a mandate under Section 25 of The Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act). As always, the CIC has kept the public disclosure of its latest Annual Report, a quiet affair. We have undertaken a preliminary review of this Annual Report. A set of our preliminary findings is given below. Many of these findings are not immediately apparent to the reader of the narrative portion of the Annual Report which the CIC has kept very brief. These findings are based on a quick analysis of the detailed dataset contained in the Annexures to the Report and comparable data collated from previous Annual Reports of the CIC. This preliminary review covers the following areas: Trends relating to RTI requests in 2019-20

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat* Dr R S Praveen Kumar is one of the most outstanding minds of our country. If I were to speak about him, I can only say, he deserves to be in the Ministry for Education. No one in my memory in the last couple of decades has influenced the lives of children of the most marginalised communities as his dedicated work in Telangana. Today. His has revolutionised the life of the students from the marginalised sections. You will not find a matching effort anywhere in India where the government schools and Ambedkar hostels have been able to show you the strength of what a government can do if it has the right intent. Dr R S Praveen Kumar is currently Secretary, Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TSWREIS) which runs 268 educational institutions in the state. More than 500 students of these residential schools cracked JEE last year. The average result of the institution is much above the state’s average results in secondary and higher se

By Dr Gurinder Kaur* The International Forest Day is celebrated on March 21 since 1971 when the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) decided to recognize the importance of forests for humans, animals and birds. Forests are a precious gift of nature. They are the natural asset of any country on the basis of which a good economy can be built. Forests are also called green gold because they cater to almost every human need. Forests absorb carbon dioxide from the air to make their own food through photosynthesis and produce oxygen for humans and other living things to breathe. They meet the nutritional needs of the human and animal population while providing habitat for wildlife. On Forest Day governments and society are made aware of the importance of forests. In the honour of the upcoming Forest Day, it makes it important to look at the global landscape and analyze how government policies are impacting current and future generations. The city of Miami in the United States of America i

A National Alliance of People’s Movement (NAPM) note, prepared during the Feminist Week of Resistance and Reflections (March 7 to 14) marking the International Women’s Day and the Savitri Bai Phule’s Death Anniversary, on (a) recognition of personhood by the state and judiciary through legal frameworks; (b) implementation and lived Experience: some ground realities; and (c) claiming agency in resistance: *** A. RECOGNITION OF PERSONHOOD BY THE STATE & JUDICIARY THROUGH LEGAL FRAMEWORKS: A FEW EXAMPLES There is no doubt that negotiating with the State is time consuming and difficult, but especially since 2014 due to an overall right-wing entrenchment in legislative, institutional and societal spaces, many of the struggles we are part of, which have been asking for recognition of personhood, equal citizenship and human rights to be ensured, have become increasingly wary of state intervention. From NALSA to the Transgender Persons Act: The NALSA judgement (2014) drew on community cons

Last year, e-journal “Visual Capitalist” ranked about 36 countries on how they were doing insofar as providing pension to their population is concerned. The ranking suggested that India is the fifth worst country in providing pension to its aging population. Titled "Ranked: The best and worst pension plans, by country", and authored by Carmen Ang, other countries that rank worse than India are Mexico, the Philippines, Turkey and Argentina. The Netherlands ranks the best, followed by Denmark, Australia, Finland and Sweden.

A Facebook page, titled “Silk and Steel”, has revealed something astonishing: How a Nazi anthropologist went as far away as Tibet in order to find traces of Aryan civilisation! Introducing itself as “a podcast about China and Silk Road, history, culture and current events” with the web address https://www.patreon.com/silknsteel , this is what it says: *** Nazi anthropologist Bruno Berger on 1938-39 Nazi expedition to Tibet sponsored by Heinrich Himmler, measuring Tibetan skulls to find trace of ancient Aryans... They’re trying to verify Nazi theory that a group of pure blood Aryans had settled in Tibet. They believed that Tibetan aristocracy still retained ancient Aryan bloodline. Later Berger tried to get access to skulls of executed Soviet Jewish commissars on the Eastern Front but failed due to logistics. So he participated in selecting 100 Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz to be killed for Jewish skeleton collection. He was convicted in 1971 for being an accomplice in the murder of

By Arjun Kumar, Soumyadip Chattopadhyay* The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the crucial link between adequate housing, human settlements and peoples’ ability to lead a healthy life. The lockdown induced work from home scenario has also highlighted differential kinds of housing demand and usage. Of late, the emerging densification of Indian cities underscores the need for planned human settlements and sustainable housing in the future, as also highlighted in the recent economic survey through geo-spatial maps. Following the pandemic outbreak and lessons learnt, while the housing industry as a whole showcases sight of recovery and the housing pricing going north, the issue of affordable housing for the poor and supply of social housing for the vulnerable requires special attention. In India, about 63.8 per cent of the urban households had their own dwelling units, around 96 percent were living in pucca houses and average floor area of the dwelling unit was about 46 square meters (sqm

A twitter handle, calling itself Indian Rwanda Radio, @IND_RwandaRadio, which claims to record evidence and examples of Indian professional media organizations allegedly engaged in what it calls "genocidal Rwanda Radio script”, has, in a series of tweets , pointed towards how nearly a year ago Muslims were sought to be blamed for spreading coronavirus. The tweets, shared on the social media, seek to expose prominent media houses for this, even as giving screenshots from electronic media which tried to send a communal message by blaming Tablighi Jamaat.