A report, researched and authored by Dalit women activists and human rights defenders, has revealed that in Bihar, there was a 10.4% rise in incidents of rape and 87% rise in cases of assault on women with an intent to outrage their modesty in 2020. In this period, 628 rape cases were registered in the state under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. The report, titled ‘Caste-Based Sexual Violence and State Impunity’, said, in spite of increased reporting of cases of sexual violence, justice is not achieved because of the complete impunity displayed by the state duty-holders, including the police and medical personnel. This not just affects the reported cases, but also the ones which remain unreported. Releasing the report at the Nav Jyoti Niketan, Kurji More, Patna, Santosh Suman Manjhi, minister of SC/ST welfare of Bihar, said, “It is our social responsibility to understand issues affecting Dalit women. We need to empower all communities to be able to co...

A couple of days after I did a story in Counterview titled "Why Gujarat Dalits want huge brass coin placed in new Parliament building base" ( April 17, 2022 ) the person who had conceptualised the unique 1000-kg brass coin idea, Martin Macwan, a well-known human rights leader, phoned me up to find out why dominant newspapers had “ignored” the event. Indeed, none of the two major papers which come out of Gujarat, “The Times of India” and the “Indian Express” wrote a word about it. The big brass coin has been prepared with the help of three Dalit artists – one from Odisha and two from Delhi – who have been involved gold plating the Somnath temple. Lord Buddha on one side, and Baba Ambedkar on the other, along with the big coin, a large number of small one foot coins have also been minted – all from about 2,700 kg brass utensils donated largely by Dalits in Gujarat’s around 750 villages, as also a dozen other states across India. Embossed is the writeup on each of them: Will Ind...

Does the Hindu diaspora in the US fear facing intensive attacks from white supremacist? It would seem so, if a  new report  prepared by the Rutgers University in New Jersey, authored among others by researchers associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, is any indication. Titled “Anti-Hindu Disinformation: A Case Study of Hinduphobia on Social Media”, the report seeks to compare the “dangers” the Hindu diaspora face from white supremacists with that of Islamic extremists. Based on “contemporary analysis” of “anti-Hindu hashtags and comments from popular social networking and messaging platforms Twitter, Tiktok, 4chan, Gab, and Telegram”, the report underlines, without mincing words, “Islamist extremist and white supremacist communities regularly disseminate genocidal and violent propaganda and memes against Hindus.” Of the five authors of the report, Prasiddha Sudhakar, who leads the team, is  president  of the Rutgers chapter of the Hindu Students Council (HSC), and...

A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, “How Dare They Peep into My Private Life? Children’s Rights Violations by Governments That Endorsed Online Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic”, has raised the alarm that two apps developed by the Government of India, Diksha and e-Pathshala, were engaged in “data practices that put children’s rights at risk”. A global investigation of the education technology (EdTech) endorsed by 49 governments for children’s education during the pandemic, the top US-based rights group analysed 163 EdTech products, stating, “Governments’ endorsements of the majority of these online learning platforms (145, 89 percent) put at risk or directly violated children’s privacy and other children’s rights, for purposes unrelated to their education.” The  report  said, “In their rush to connect children to virtual classrooms, few governments checked whether the EdTech they were rapidly endorsing or procuring for schools were safe for children. As a result, children w...

  Narasimha Reddy Donthi, former board member of IFOAM-Asia, which is part of the Germany-based International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), a pioneering organization on organic farming across the world, in a letter to the secretary, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers, taking strong exception to the Standard Operation Procedures (SOPs) released for aerial spraying of pesticides, has said that the move contradicts the Insecticide Act. Pointing out that he had brought this to the notice of the Central Insecticide Board and Registration Committee (CIBRC), Dhonti says, allowing aerial spraying, using drones and unmanned, remote controlled vehicles can be catastrophic to humans, agriculture, farmers, ecology and wildlife. Currently adjunct professor, Padala Rama Reddy Law College, and member, Research Advisory Committee, Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad, Dhonti insists on the withdrawal of the interim approval for drone application of pesticides, ...

A new study on the implementation of one of the major policy initiatives for the urban poor by the Narendra Modi government after it came to power, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), has said that in Gujarat, which happens to be the Prime Minister’s home state, has quoted state officials as “confirming” that no progress towards tenure regularization, a key requirement for providing housing to the state’s slum dwellers. Stating that this particularly true of smaller town, the study, carried out by the non-profit Homes in the City (HIC), which is based in Bhuj, district headquarter of Kutch that saw a devastating earthquake in 2001, says, the failure to provide affordable housing is there despite the fact that there has been “significant demand” in all the 83 out of 153 Gujarat municipalities studied by experts involved in the study. According to the study, out f a total of 1.41 lakh demands for housing under the Beneficiary Led Construction (BLC) category, 94,232 (66.7%) as of September...