RajivSpeak

  This is sort of rejoinder to my Counterview  story . I was a little surprised on receiving a phone call from a former government official, who retired in 2015, Bipin Bhatt, whom I have known as one of the more socially conscious senior babus of Gujarat. A non-IAS bureaucrat, I first interacted him during my Gandhinagar days, when I used to cover Gujarat Sachivalaya for the Times of India. At that time he was Gujarat’s rural labour commissioner, a post which he occupied between 2004 and 2007. Thereafter I have been in touch with him. Bhatt phoned me up objecting to the story (“Debt bondage, forced labour, sexual abuse in Gujarat's Bt cottonseed farms: Dutch study”) based on a  study  published by a Dutch NGO, Arisa, with the active help of the Ahmedabad-based labour rights group Centre for Labour Research and Action (CLRA), which has carried out considerable work among migrant workers, especially those who are from Gujarat’s eastern tribal belt. Apparently, Bha...

   A just-released study, sponsored by a Netherlands-based non-profit,  Arisa , “Seeds of Oppression Wage sharecropping in Bt cottonseed production in Gujarat, India”, has said that a new form of bondage, or forced labour, exists in North India’s Bt cottonseed farms, in which bhagiyas, or wage sharecroppers, are employed against advances and are then often required to work for years together “without regular payment of wages.”

  A memorandum submitted to the Gujarat government by various fisherfolk associations of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat under the leadership of Ahmedabad NGO Centre for Social Justice's senior activist Arvind Khuman, who is based in Amreli, has suggested that the relief package offered to the fishermen affected by the Tauktae cyclone is not only inadequate, it is also gender insensitive.

  As would generally happen, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s  tweet  – that not only was he “absolutely delighted” with the news of UNESCO tag to Dholavira, but he “ first visited ” the site during his “student days and was mesmerised by the place” – is being doubted by his detractors. None of the two tweets, strangely, even recalls once that it’s a Harappan site in Gujarat.

  Will the new report by well-known elite NGO Toxics Link create a ripple in the powerful corridors of Delhi? Titled “Quantitative analysis of microplastics along River Ganga”, forwarded to Counterview, doesn’t just say that Ganga is the second most polluted river in the world, next only to Yangtze (China). It goes ahead to do a comparison of microplastics pollution in three cities shows Varanasi – the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi – is more  polluted compared to Kanpur and Haridwar.

A senior chartered accountant, whom I have known intimately (I am not naming him, as I don’t have his permission), has forwarded me an Indian Express (IE) story (July 18), “Ashwini Vaishnaw: The man in the chair”, which, he says, “contradicts” the blog (July 17), "Will Vaishnaw, close to Modi since Vajpayee days, ever be turnaround man for Railways?" I had written a day earlier and forwarded it to many of my friends. Written after taking extensive talks the reporters Liz Mathew and Aishwarya Mohanty appear to have had with BJP insiders and government officials (of course, all anonymous), I read through the IE story and sought a reaction from a former government official, who had also seen my blog and was happy about whatever I had written, doubting Vaishnaw would be a big success. The ex-government official, whom I forwarded the story, told me, while IE piece was surely presented a “positive side of Vaishnaw”, and that the new Railways-cut-IT minister is indeed a “very brig...

Gordhan Zadaphia While alerts were coming in over the last few days about a series of articles on how phones of “journalists, ministers, activists” may have been used to spy on them with the help of an Israeli project, Pegasus, finally, when I got up on Monday morning, I saw a Times of India story quoting (imagine!, we never used to do this, did just a followup in case we missed a story) the Wire, a top news portal on this providing some details, along with government reaction. While the first Wire story on Monday confines itself to journalists, including the news portal founder-editor Siddharth Varadarajan, pointing towards an “international collaborative reporting project” which establishes “the frightening extent to which governments around the world, including India, could be using surveillance tools in ways that have nothing to do with national security”, a friend in Australia, Neeraj Nanda, editor, South Asian Times, Melbourne, sent me a link of a “Guardian” story in the aftern...

Finally, at least one expert, top historian Ramachandra Guha, has spoken out on eviction of 200 families living in the Gandhi Ashram premises. Last week, I received an email alert from a veteran academic, Ashoke Chatterjee, former director, National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, which happens to be one of the most prestigious academic institutes of India based, informing me about it. NID is one of the several top institutes founded when Jawaharlal Nehru was India’s Prime Minister. The email alert by Chatterjee, who is also associated with several NGOs, including Centre for Social Justice and Janvakas, quotes Guha, stating how the eviction drive by the Gujarat government in order to build a hi fi Gandhi memorial reflects the challenges faced by a Trust, which is said to look after the Gandhi Ashram, especially in view of the fact it is “composed of ageing men and women, who all live in Gujarat, and thus cannot speak out for fear that they or their families will be victimized by...

Ever since he was appointed as railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, I was curious to know who he was and how did he come closer to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and, most important, when. Hence, I decided to talk with some Sachivalaya officials in Gujarat in order to find out if there was, if any, Gujarat (or Modi) connection. I got particularly keen after I read in Free Press Journal (FPJ) that, a product of IIT, Vaishnaw “quit government service in 2008 and went to Wharton University in USA to pursue an MBA.” On his return, the daily said, “After working for top firms, he set up his own automotive components manufacturing units in Gujarat.” First, let me put the record straight. FPJ is wrong: he did not quit government service (or IAS) in 2008, as reported. He quit in 2010, after returning from Wharton, as the Hindustan Times reports . Apparently, he went to the US to do MBA, obviously after taking study leave from the Government of India, which is what many bureaucrats have done. Be t...

  Finding “serious gaps” in disposing of biomedical waste in Gujarat, a new study, jointly carried out by Delhi-based environmental group Toxics Link in collaboration of Ahmedabad’s Paryavaran Mitra, has found that 13% of health facilities in what India’s powers-that-be consider “model state” have not even tied up with a Common Bio Medical Waste Treatment Facility (CBWTF), a condition without which they are not allowed to operate under law.

Jharkhand's Adivasi women  A lot is being written on Father Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest who is known more for his work for tribal rights in Jharkhand. His death at the age of 84, even when he was an under trial prisoner for his alleged involvement in the Bhima Koregaon violence three years go, has, not without reason, evoked sharp reaction, not just in India but across the world. Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, said, “Human Rights Defender and Jesuit priest Fr Stan Swamy has died in custody, nine months after his arrest on false charges of terrorism. Jailing Human Rights Defenders is inexcusable.” In India, human rights groups have been sharper, calling his death an “institutional murder”, stating, Modi-Shah regime is solely responsible for this. While there appears to be little to deny in what is being stated, I wondered how I had great difficulty in finding out who Fr Stan was six years ago. My friend, a senior civil society activist Ashok Shrimali, ...

Home minister Amit Shah, health minister Harsh Vardhan Don’t India’s top ministries – of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) and of Home Affairs (MoHA) – tally data before releasing them? It would seem so… A few days back, I did a story in Counterview , based on an MoHA report, stating that Gujarat has the lowest sex rate at birth (SRB) at 901 girls as against 1000 births, followed by Assam (903), Madhya Pradesh (905) and Jammu & Kashmir (909), raising valid apprehensions that widescale female foeticide may be prevalent in India’s “model” State. Before I did the story, I had read a story in Gujarati daily “Sandesh”, which said that Gujarat was declared 100% Open Defecation Free in 2017, yet the claim turns out to be bogus in in the National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 report, released recently by MoHFW, which said that 26% of households still defecate in the open and that the state had added just 10% new toilets at the time of the survey (2019). I asked senior journalist, Neelesh ...

Sudarshan Iyengar, Ramchandra Guha Rehabilitating about 200 families, mostly Dalits, living in the Gandhi Ashram premises by offering them Rs 60 lakh in order to implement a Rs 1,200 crore project called Gandhi Ashram Memorial and Precinct Development Project reportedly to bring the Ashram into its "original shape" as Gandhi established appears to me strange, to say the least. The residents of the ashram premises have been approached to sign a consent letter agreeing to vacate their homes, according to which, either shift they shift to an alternative residential colony or accept Rs 60 lakh as compensation. Those who have signed the consent letter are being paid Rs 20 lakh as advance. About 20 of them have accepted Rs 40 lakh on vacating their houses. In order to rehabilitate them, a circular has been issued in the name of the Ahmedabad district collector forming an eight-member coordination committee. Instead of a Gandhian who has long been associated with the committee, Guja...