2020

by Nupur Pattanaik *
The Corona-virus despair has led to rise in child marriages globally, According to estimates by Global child Report, it has been found that it has affected gender equality. Due to acute poverty families are at the risk of vulnerability and girl child are sold in the name of marriage. The Covid-19 Pandemic has made their lives quite miserable and made them more endangered vulnerable to trafficking It also depicted that girls are affected by the humanitarian pandemic and (…)

by Prem Singh
In the new National Education Policy 2020 (hereinafter NEP), there has been a quantum leap towards neo-colonization of Indian education via privatization to further corporatization of education. There is a crucial need to understand this new dimension of the NEP. Significantly, under the NEP, foreign universities and foreign direct investment (FDI) have been allowed entry in the realm of higher education. The country is already full of private schools, colleges, institutes (…)

* Letter to the readers, Mainstream, October 24
* Domestic workers in Maharashtra in the High Court | Sujata Gothoskar
* Double Standards in Politics | Barun Das Gupta

Unbridled exercise of power comes at a price and we are witnessing it every day within and outside the government.
With the overwhelming dominance of ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the Centre and its governments in many States and a large footprint across India, there is a new political culture of concentrated power and its misuse at play. The government of Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister in 2014 and later again in 2019 no longer relies on support from regional political (…)

It is by now widely acknowledged in many circles that domestic work is work that is crucial to the maintenance and reproduction of society and yet is the most neglected area of work and is not even officially recognised as work. In the recent pandemic, while some work like that related to the health care sector was at the forefront of social and economic life, other work like auto or garment production almost ground to a total halt all over the world. One sort of work that was slowly and (…)

by Arun Srivastava
Many things are happening for the first time in Bihar. This was for the first time the Unuion Finance Minister openly offered free coronavirus vaccination for all in the form of bribe to the voters of Bihar, it is also for the first time in the electoral political history of Bihar that election manifestos or “Sankalp Patra” of political parties have become topics of discussion and discourses in the social circle. The discussion is not confined to the living rooms of (…)

by Vappala Balachandran *
October 15, 2020
While the Justice JN Patel-led Bhima Koregaon Commission is yet to finalise its report, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) filed a 10,000-page charge-sheet on October 9. The NIA felt that it was a ‘plot to damage the state’. Several civil rights activists and academics were charged for the gravest offences against the state, including arms training. Among them is 83-year-old Jesuit priest, Stan Swamy. A stunned Jharkhand Chief Minister (…)

Letter to the Editor sent by Bharat Dogra
I am sure that countless readers share the shock and distress which I felt on reading the statement by participants of the Mahila Ekta Yatra, published in the Mainstream dated October 17, regarding the mention of several of these women participants, known for their deep commitment to communal harmony, in the charge sheet filed in the context of communal riots in Delhi. It is a shocking and truly dystopian situation if women who take great risk to (…)

Bye-elections for 28 Assembly seats in Madhya Pradesh are going to be held on November 3. If the Congress wants to come back to power, it has to win all the 28 seats. So the challenge for the Congress is high. Tempers are naturally running high. But what the Congress veteran and former MP chief minister Kamal Nath said in an election meeting was in very bad taste. He ridiculed the BJP candidate of that constituency, a dalit woman, as being an “item”. Item is not an abusive or derogatory (…)

The promise of free COVID vaccine to the people of BIhar as item no one in BJP election manifesto 2020 makes it the first political party in India to politicise the vaccine issue. Such gross decision making the vaccine a poll and election matter for seeking votes constitutes nothing short of a callous approach to deal with a pandemic which has flattened the curve of health, human and human security. Right since the month of March 2020 BJP has adopted a narrowly self-serving approach in (…)