2018

by Seema Mustafa
The biggest reason for not re-employing retired bureaucrats, particularly after a spell out of power, is that they tend to remain stuck in time. In that if an official has retired in, say, 2000 and is re-employed in 2010, for him the ten intervening years have never happened. The good or the bad of the decade is not his reality—here one does not need to qualify ‘her’ as rarely are women bureaucrats ever brought back into gainful seats of power after retirement—as for him (…)

by Vrushali Dehadray
J.P. Naik, the founder of the Indian Institute of Education, was the Adviser to the Government of India during the 1960s and the chief architect of the Kothari Commission Report which is still considered as a milestone in the history of India’s education policy. This article discusses his experiments in education and health at the grassroot level. It is being published on the occasion of the Teachers’ Day on September 5.
J.P. Naik (September 5, 1907-August 30, 1981), (…)

by Paroma Bhattacharya
A child-friendly world is no utopian fable and well within our reach. For putting things into perspective let us first understand what a child-friendly world is. Simply put, it is a world where all children are free, safe, healthy and educated and are able to enjoy their universal and fundamental rights without any exception whatsoever. It is a world where children are in an enabling environment that helps them realise their dreams and unleash their fullest (…)

by Gautam Sen
In an unprecedented move, over 300 Indian Army officers have approached the Supreme Court of India on August 14 this year with a writ petition, posing a question on whether a soldier‘s discretion under operational conditions can be put under legal scrutiny. The move is in the backdrop of the investigation instituted by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), at the behest of the highest judiciary, against some Army and State Police functionaries in certain cases emanating (…)

I’ve lived here for a long time, breathing its air, walking on its soil, building up my life, becoming a part of the neighbourhood— a sense of being inseparable embedded in my consciousness.
Now I’m told I don’t belong here; my name does not figure in a list prepared to find the ‘indigenous’. Where will I go, if I fail to prove my long forgotten ‘credentials’? Is it to head towards deportation?
Uncertain future looms large: stamped being an immigrant, huddled in a concentration camp with (…)

The Editors Guild of India condemns a Myanmar court’s verdict that has sentenced two Reuters journalists to seven years in prison after pronouncing them guilty of having breached the country’s Official Secrets Act.
The Guild is opposed to the use of provisions under the Official Secrets Act in any country to throttle the voice of the media. The two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were investigating the death of 10 Rohingya Muslims.
The Guild believes that the arrest and (…)

The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India issued the following statement on August 29, 2018.
The official information of the Reserve Bank of India that 99.3 per cent currency in circulation at the time of note ban has come back to the Bank, exposes the tall claim of the Prime Minister and Finance Minister that black money got into trouble and the money to extremists has stopped due to demonetisation.
The Reserve Bank should explain how much is deposited by the NRIs in the (…)

POLITICAL NOTEBOOK
The time has come to call a spade a spade. The Modi Government can no longer be called just an ‘anti-democratic’ or ‘authoritarian’ government. It is fast becoming a fascist government. Suppression of all dissenting voices, arm-twisting of the media to fall in line with the official propaganda and make them join the round-the-clock singing of the praise of the Messiah who has come to take the 120 million people of this country to the portals of the Promised Land, (…)

On August 23, Kuldip Nayar, the tallest surviving pillar of our Fourth Estate, breathed his last in the Capital. Just sixteen days earlier he and his wife met me at a function at New Delhi’s India Internation Centre. As usual he warmly told me: “I thought of contacting you. I was thinking of Nikhil.” Then he reminisced of their joint struggle against the Emergency, their staunch support to the MKSS’ Right to Information movement and their visit to the India-Pakistan border at Wagah at the (…)

COMMUNICATION
Kuldip Nayar, the eminent journalist who breathed his last on August 23, will of course be remembered first and foremost for the remarkable continuity and extraordinary reach of his writings stretching over several decades but in addition he will be remembered also for his contribution to several social movements and causes. In fact several important events organised by important social movements were not considered complete without his blessings in recent years, and Kuldipji (…)