2020

Letter to the Readers No 23 – August 29
Chief ministers from the states of Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Puducherry met in a virtual meeting at the initiative of Congress Party’s interim leader Sonia Gandhi and the Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee on August 26 and have called for forging a common alliance against the Central Government. They have grievances on many common issues the non-payment of GST dues and central government going (…)

by Sukla Sen
Right now, we, Indians, are witnessing an extraordinary spectacle, involving the highest court of the land. So much so that the venerable New York Times has characterised it as the Supreme Court being on trial!
A brief recap of the developments that led to it. Two recent tweets, dated June 27th and 29th, by Prashant Bhushan, a senior Supreme Court advocate - widely acknowledged as a crusader for justice and fairness in public life, has raised a veritable storm. On July 9, (…)

by Salman Anees Soz
Donald Trump critic George Conway recently wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post, headlined “I (still) believe the president, and in the president”. Conway’s piece inspired me to write something that I didn’t think possible: I believe the prime minister and in the prime minister.
I believe the prime minister when he says that there is “no intrusion” of the Chinese military into Indian territory, even though his own Defence Ministry posted a document on its (…)

[This article is part of New Education Policy 2020 Special Focus Issue]
This article is not a detailed analysis of the National Education Policy (NEP 2020): its politico-economic and ideological implications, or the debates it has already generated regarding the possibility of increasing privatization and commodification of higher education. Instead, in this article, I will make an attempt to reflect—and that too through the eyes of a teacher—on some of the key ideals of education and (…)

[This article is part of the New Educational Policy 2020 - Special Focus Issue]
by Biswajit Bhoi*
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 announced by the Central Government has generated wide debate among the public and media. At a time when the government and people are concerned and struggling to protect their lives and livelihoods due to the covid-19 pandemic the government has shown undue haste to announce the NEP 2020 without even any parliamentary discussion and consultation with (…)

The Central Government’s New Education Policy(NEP) was out recently and is being debated nation Wide. While the NEP has covered a wide variety of issues ranging from Pre-School education to higher education, my purpose here is to scrutinise some of the key aspects of the Policy.

Language as the means to communicate thoughts, ideas, information and knowledge, is an inseparable part of personal and socio-cultural identity. Wars have been fought on the basis of language. An example is the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 due to dominant West Pakistan imposing Urdu on the Bengali-speaking people of East Pakistan.

[This article is part of New Education Policy 2020 Special Focus Issue]
A friend of mine requested that I must contribute my suggestions sought by the government for the preparation of the New Education Policy (NEP). He reminded me about my elaborate critique of the report of Ambani-Birla Committee, constituted by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He added that in the continuance of the argument presented in that critique I should suggest to the committee that the agenda of liberalization and (…)

by Mrinal Biswas*
Country’s journalists are the most endangered species now. They are being fired right and left, facing pay cuts or being laid off at random. Not rare is the case of held up due payments to the scribes for an indefinite period. News industry owners have become most ruthless in the midst of pandemic. the mayhem of the media employees began before the onset of global phenomenon though (Read Massacre of Newspersons published by the Indian Journalists’ Association in March (…)

It is an increasingly and widely accepted aspect of agriculture and farm policy that heavy chemical pesticide use of recent decades in agriculture has caused immense harm and there is wisdom in reducing pesticide use and moving towards pesticide-free farming to the extent possible in various regional contexts. Millions of people have died and suffered serious diseases due to exposure to chemical pesticides and consumption of pesticide contaminated food. There has been immense harm to (…)