RajivBuzz

While the Gujarat government may claim to have  decided  to begin a “tobacco free Gujarat” campaign in 2011 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the state chief minister, yet, latest available data suggest that as many as 51.4 per cent of men and seven per cent of women in the state use any form of tobacco – it can be smoking cigarettes, bidis, cigars pipes, or hookas, chewing pan masalas with or without tobacco, use of gutkha or pan masala with tobacco, or use of khaini or snuff.

  Renowned ecologist Dr Vandana Shiva has expressed concern that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Corporation, has joined the bandwagon of “a poison cartel of three" – Monsanto and Bayer, Syngenta and ChemChina, Dow and DuPont – all of whom allegedly have “roots in Hitler’s Germany and finding chemicals to kill people”.

In a shocking revelation, all of India’s neighbours – China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Myanmar – rank better than India in the World Happiness Index, worked out by independent scholars under the aegis of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions network in part the Ernesto Illy Foundation. Ranking 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be, the  report  which provides the ranking says, India ranks 140th, as against Pakistan 67th, China 93rd, Nepal 100th, Bangladesh 125th, Sri Lanka 130th, and Myanmar 131rd. Identifying India as one of the “significant losers” along with Venezuela, Malaysia and Ukraine, the report says, the entire South Asian region showed “a drop of a full point, from 5.1 to 4.1 on the 0 to 10 scale, driven mainly by the experience of India, given its dominant share of South Asian population.” The report continues, “The five largest drops since 2005-08 were in Yemen, India, Syria, Botswana and Venezuela, wit...

  In a major embarrassment for Gujarat model, of the 21 samples taken by officials of the state government's environmental watchdog Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) in two villages of Vadodara district and analyzed by its laboratory in Gandhinagar, the state capital, to find out pollution level in groundwater, 16 were assessed as highly contaminated – these were, in fact, found to be discharging reddish, brownish, or yellowish water.

  Days are not far off when Gujarat’s business capital Ahmedabad would be added to the list of places, led by Jharkhand’s rural areas, where failure of aadhaar-based biometric authentication  led to   25 of 45 starvation deaths across India since 2017. Ahmedabad-based NGO Human Development and Research Centre (HDRC) survey has revealed that Kesarben Ramabhai Thakore, 85, a poor woman living in Sheherkotda slum area of Ahmedabad, is unable to get her ration from the public distribution system (PDS) because her fingers fail in biometric authentication. An HDRC note claims, Kesarben, a single woman, “often goes to bed hungry if she is unable any food, for which she must go out begging daily”, adding, there were in all 1,795 families (24%) out of 7,512 surveyed who do not get ration because of “technical glitches”, which include fingerprint validation. An HDRC media interaction with tens of slumdwellers revealed that a majority of them did not know that the biometric aut...

A new World Bank report ranks India 125th in its Women, Business and the Law (WBL) index among 187 economies it seeks to analyse across the globe. The report's main aim claims to be to "gain new insight into how women’s employment and entrepreneurship choices are affected by legal gender discrimination. On a scale of 100, India's score is 71.25, worse than the global average of 74.71.

Even as the Congress plans its first working committee meet in Gujarat on February 28 after an almost  58 year gap , there is reason to wonder what is in store for India’s grand old party in a state which has been long been a BJP bastion – in fact ever since mid-1990s. Ahead of the then assembly polls in late 2012, talking with me, a senior Gujarat Congress leader, currently Rajya Sabha MP, frankly said he saw no reason why Congress would win.