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In a surprise development, a Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) report titled ‘Vital Statistics of India based on the Civil Registration System’ has revealed that Gujarat is the worst performer insofar as Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB) is concerned, raising concern whether female foeticide is rampant in a state touted as model by India’s top rulers.

  An email alert to me from a top ex-IAS bureaucrat, termed as Gujarat’s turnaround man for revamping loss-making state public sector undertakings (PSUs), has sought to take a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s  remark  on the Yoga day – that the ancient Indian exercise provides an “infinite solutions” within ourselves, offering “the biggest source of energy in the universe.”

  About 12.3 billion or 113,000 tonnes of used sanitary pads are dumped in landfills in India every year, adding to the already existing plastic pollution in the country, a new study titled 'Menstrual Products and their Disposal' released by the environmental group Toxics Link has said.

Some time back, a human rights defender, Vidya Bhushan Rawat, who frequently writes for Counterview, forwarded to me a video interview with Guru Prabhakar Dhakade, calling him one of India's well known violinists. Somehow I missed the email alert. Scanning through my past emails, I found Rawat's youtube video and a short writeup. Dhakade is based in Nagpur and has devoted his life for the Hindustani classical music. A number of his disciples have now been part of Hindi cinema world in Mumbai, says Rawat. He has performed live in various parts of the country as well as abroad. What however attracted me was Dhakade's assertions in video about Dr BR Ambedkar, India's undisputed Dalit icon. Recorded several years back at his residence and music school in Nagpur, Dhakade not only speaks candidly about issues he faced, but that he is a believer in Dr Ambedkar's philosophy. It is in this context that Dhakade narrates his problems, even as stating that he is determined ...

Average work over the last one month during the second wave A recent civil society survey, conducted to analyse the impact of the second Covid wave among informal sector workers of Gujarat and Rajasthan,  has found that they were able to get work for just about 18 days in a month on an average. “In Ahmedabad construction workers at the nakas reported getting work for just eight days in a month”, the survey report, forwarded by the by the Centre for Labour Research and Action (CLRA) to Counterview, said, adding, “The basti residents of Ahmedabad reported just seven days of work.”

Cyrus Poonwalla, Pankaj Patel At least nine people have become new billionaires since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, thanks to the excessive profits pharmaceutical corporations with monopolies on Covid vaccines are making, the  People’s Vaccine Alliance  (PVA), a global alliance advocating its availability free of charge to all people in all countries, has revealed ahead of the G20 leaders Global Health Summit.

KP Sasi, a well-known Left-wing film director and cartoonist from Thrissur, Kerala, currently based in Bengaluru, has come up with a 12-point charter on what he calls Socialism of a Third Kind. Sent in an email alert via Dalit Media Watch, Sasi, who is son of late K Damodaran, a Marxist theoretician and writer and one of the founder leaders of the Communist Party in India, provides his perspective of the types of equal status he thinks socialism should have. Though I found it interesting, I didn’t find in any of his 12 points what exactly his view on economy is – whether there could be economic equality, especially at a time when even Marxists agree private capital is a must for development in view of the fact that the productive forces are not ripe enough to change relations of production, supposed to be a precondition of socialism. Be that as it may, I found the 12 point charter by Sasi interesting, coming as it does from a person who has made powerful documentaries like "A Va...