2016

Yatin Oza, a former BJP MLA from Gujarat, who was a close confidant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi when the latter was the Chief Minister of the State, has in an open letter to him, dated November 9, 2016, blasted his demonetisation drive, calling it an act of befooling the people of the nation.
He also accused that all the district cooperative banks in Gujarat, controlled by people close to the BJP, exchanged Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes against smaller denomination since 9 pm on (…)

by Arun Srivastava
The word ‘nationalism’ was the unwritten sanction for Hitler to kill six million Jews as the Germans cheerfully watched. In recent times the global fraternity is witnessing nationalism once again raising its head but this time in a more ugly and ferocious manner in the form of ultra-nationalism. What is significant is that the Right reactionary forces, articulating the interest of capitalism, have been fostering this resurgence. Whether it is the USA, India, or any other (…)

by Pradeep Nair
This article attempts to envision the vivifi-cation of the health sector with the substructure of technological, digital and mobile revolution in the country. The healthcare sector is the primary service provider and welfare set-up which also contributes largely to the Indian economy in terms of revenue and employment generation. The growing outreach of the digital technology and mobile phones would change the face and scope of the health services and its delivery. It would (…)

by Supriya Sharma
The Hague’s Arbitration Tribunal on July 12 clearly backed the Philippines on the issue of the South China Sea (SCS) dispute. It also declared large parts of the South China Sea as international waters and a few as other countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). India stood in support of The Hague’s ruling as it believed that the international law should always be abided.
Apart from being a member of the UNCLOS, there are three large reasons why India needs to play a (…)

by Abhimanyu Kohar
Today in the 21st century it is not easy to directly put a nation under slavery. But for the last 20 years, various Western agendas and treaties of powerful nations are indirectly driving the weaker nations to slavery. Amidst such agendas, there is a new treaty, LEMOA, under which America can deploy its soldiers at any place at any time in India. Nobody has any realisation of the problems we have invited after signing this treaty. After concluding this ‘Logistic Exchange (…)

by Suranjita Ray
For the last few decades now, Malkangiri district1 of Western Odisha has remained a concern of the governments both at the Centre as well as in the State. It not only ranks last in the indices of development and figures at the top for acute malnutrition, but more recently it has also seen horrors such as that of a father forced to walk six kilometres with the body of his 10-year-old daughter after the ambulance left them midway. Moreover, Malkangiri has seen an increasing (…)

WOMEN’S WORLD
by Fayezah Iqbal
In a world stupefied with the mantras of ‘feminism’ and ‘women emancipation’, no wonder if the women are infatuated with the thought of gaining respect and dignity only by competing with men. In the words of the famous American psychologist, Timothy Leary, ‘The women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.’ So here we are, in an era saturated and congealed with notions of women liberation and gender justice, where women have somewhere forgotten the (…)

by Ranbir Singh and Kushal Pal
The prescription of educational qualifications by the Government of Haryana in the 2016 elections for contesting to the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) has been reported to be a game-changer. (Kundu, 2016) Although only 33.33 per cent posts of sarpanches have been reserved for women, as many as 41.46 per cent of them were able to become sarpanches in the 2016 Haryana Panchayat elections. Among them the representation of the general castes was 50.79 per (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
It was a massacre of innocents by all counts. What happened at the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal in the early morning of December 3 was not just a tragedy but a heinous crime which killed nearly two thousand and hospitalised countless others, brings out something much more ghastly than the hazards of modern industrialisation.
The enormity of the crime—unprecedented in our times—lies not merely in any negligence on the part of the workers and superintending staff (…)

Human Rights Day is observed on December 10 every year commemorating the day, in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To mark the occasion we are reproducing the following article N.C. wrote twentyfour years ago.
The government’s decision to set up a National Human Rights Commission is a significant indication of its being able to read the signs of the times. The Prime Minister has made the eloquent claim about his government’s (…)