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Modi launching Beti Bachao Beti Padhao in January 2015 The Government of India, at least its Ministry of Women and Child Development, does not seem to think that there is anything to celebrate about implementation of the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) scheme in Gujarat,  launched  by Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the historic battleground of Panipat in Haryana on January 22, 2015.

Ever since the controversy – if can be called that – broke out last year about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BA and MA degrees, I had been informally telling some of those involved in questioning his educational qualifications, including Ahmedabad-based political activist Roshan Shah and a few scribes, that, what I know for sure is, he was an MA student in Gujarat University. I am naming Roshan – whom I have found to be a fine person with good insights into local Gujarat issues, and a keen campaigner against Modi and Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel on social media (something Modi’s opponents utterly lack) – because he was a kingpin in raising this and similar such controversies, citing RTI pleas and complaints. Not that doubts about Modi’s educational qualifications did not exist earlier. They did exist even in my mind after he became Gujarat chief minister. Yet, these doubts seemed to have got cleared, when during an informal gathering, I asked Dinesh Shukla, a veteran retired...

Last evening, I was a little put off for a while. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, and new Gujarat BJP chief Vijay Rupani (whom I had known as a relatively more suave politician among many of his ilk) told media that the Gujarat government would provide 10 percent reservation to dominant castes having income less than Rs 6 lakh. It wasn’t reservation, already a contentious issue, which seemed to bother me immediately, as much as the figure, Rs 6 lakh. I wondered: Does it mean that a tax payer should be allowed reservation? As expected, in his one-upmanship, Congress’ opposition leader Shankarsinh Vaghela, an ex-BJP man, came up with the demand to raise the reservation limit to 20 per cent, and the income limit to Rs 12 lakh! What he was demanding was simply amazing. Many class one officers of the Gujarat government, except a few in the IAS, would be “allowed” reservation. I desperately searched for reaction. A scribe, who passionately covered the reservation ro...

  Is Gujarat government refusing to spend enough on social sector in accordance with its capacity, as reflected in its high value of the gross state domestic product (GSDP)? It would seem so, if the latest data, released by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its “State Finances: A Study of State Budgets 2915-16”, are any indication.

  Gujarat may be claiming to have provided the widest internet coverage compared to the rest of India through the state-sponsored Gujarat State Wide Area Network (GSWAN). However, a recent Government of India survey shows that access to internet in the state’s urban areas is just to 41.3 per cent of its households, which is far below the national average of 48.7 per cent.

Wetland off Nirma cement plant A just-released book by senior Gujarat-based scholar Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly, who has served as professor at a top Indian IAS training institute, seeks to make a controversial suggestion: About the need to look at Gujarat not as a land of “Gandhi, Sardar Patel, and, of late, Narendra Modi”.

Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly, who has just finished her stint as professor at the Centre for Rural Studies, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, the premier institute which “trains” IAS babus in administrative skills, has come up with a new book – an “ethnographic” account of five major mass movements of Gujarat.