Living in Vejalpur in Ahmedabad is a nightmate for middle classes during monsoon. The society where I live, Shrinandnagar Part 2, houses about 3000 people and has nearly 650 flats. It is society where an elected BJP corporator also lives. I went up on the terrace on Sunday morning to see if waters had receded somewhat after the heavy 6 inch rains that continued yesterday till midnight. They did not. I took a few photographs. Even eight hours after I took the photographs, things remained unchanged. I was told that the the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation had put up a facility last year to clear any such drain immediately. It appears that the facility which is supposed to pump water in the Sarkhej Roza lake failed to work.  Our society, as also Shrinandnagar Parts 1 and 3, where more people live than what they do here, are low lying. Built by Bakeri, known to be a "clean" builder, all these are in low lying. Some say a huge water body was recovered to bui...

Recently, I went with a small group of friends to the south of Ahmedabad. I was part of the team which was called to enjoy rural dinner. Previously an arid, the entire agricultural land in the area, I found, has been turned green. What a site, I thought, even as I was told by a farmer that they produce different vegetables. I found small trucks reaching the small farm house where we were to dine to upload several bundles of vegetables, including tomatoes, which are in the news for their high costs.  One of the farmers took us for a walk to the nearby areas. We stopped at a small eucalyptus forest, grown on the common grazing land. The farmer told us that this forest "was sucking away lot of underground water, which we should be using for agriculture." He explained, "This is the nature of the tree. Why has the forest department grown this forest is difficult to understand." As he kept on complaining, we took a few photographs of this small patch, which stood just nex...

  Testimonies at a public hearing in the wake of preparations for the G20 summit, where representatives from Mumbai, Kolkata, Nagpur, Indore, Udaipur, apart from different bastis in Delhi, have revealed "harrowing experiences of forced evictions", a report prepared by the organisers identifying themselves as Concerned Citizens of India has claimed.

  A new report, which has named five French banks and a pension fund for supporting Myanmar military junta, has blamed one of them, Crédit Agricole, for investing in India’s state-owned company Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) that has been implicated in the sale of military equipment to the Myanmar junta since the 2021 coup attempt. The  findings  by global NGOs Info Birmanie, BankTrack and Justice for Myanmar (JFM) have been published while France is  preparing to welcome  Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a guest of honour at the July 14th Bastille Day parade in Paris, as part of the celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the France-India partnership. The report also notes that BEL is a leading partner of the Thalès Group group,too. A JFM  investigation  published earlier had revealed that one of Thales' long-time partners, BEL, has a particularly close relationship with the Myanmar junta, and exports military technology to it. A special se...