2022

by Shazman Shariff
Activists, road crash survivors and victims’ families ha[d] a message for the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting on Global Road Safety, 30 June-1 July
13 June 2022
Seventeen-year-old Durva Bhasin in Jaipur had the morning off from school that Monday, as she walked to her Kathak practical exam, excited to show her prowess after months of practice. A rashly-driven bus ended her dreams.
That day, 3 May 1999, also forever changed the lives of her parents Mridul and (…)

Book Review by G Narasimha Raghavan __0__
The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech Is Everything by Eric Heinze London: The MIT Press 2002 211 Pages ISBN 9780262046459 (hardcover) $27.95
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Interestingly, the visual artist and utopian author, Robert Alan Silverstein’s statement is accurate on its timing: "The evolution of the human rights movement clearly illustrates humanity’s ongoing struggle toward creating a better world." It is struggle, struggle and struggle that the author, (…)

WHO WILL?
When the young Veer shouted no one heard
When the adult Ahmed howled no one gave an ear
When the old Kapil screamed no one turned back
We all got so engaged that we forgot that we could not just speak but also hear
I was speaking, she was typing and the system was dictating but no one heard
We were so busy pressing buttons that we forgot to express
We were so occupied sending messages that we forgot to regret
Many passed by and many passed away
We had forgotten our (…)

by Jason Hung, United Nations University in Bangkok
Although trade unions are widespread in China, conditions for rural-to-urban migrant workers haven’t improved as fast as they have for local urban employees.
China’s rapid urban transformation led to vast numbers of new jobs offering better pay than rural work. People migrated from villages to secure these jobs and try to lift their families’ standard of living. In 2019, 36 percent of China’s working population – an estimated 291 (…)

* Affirmative Action in Higher Education: India and the West | Arup Maharatna
* Academic Freedom, Institutional Autonomy and the Board of Governors | Nabanipa Bhattacharjee & Manish Thakur

Letter to the readers, Mainstream, July 2, 2022
If you are critic of the Government in India led by Prime Minister Modi, sooner or later the state machine (or ruling party-friendly infrastructure) will go after you, this has pretty much become a set pattern for all to see. On June 25, 2022 when many of India’s human rights groups were marking the anniversary of the infamous declaration of Emergency in 1975, we saw the arrest of Teesta Setalvad one of India’s pioneering human rights (…)

Abstract: [gris]There are distinct indications that a persistent pressure for rapid expansion of enrolment or market or revenues particularly in the case of growing private HE institutions has fuelled and contributed to a rising spread, popularity, and reach of affirmative action in HE generally in developed countries. A considerable uncertainty prevails over the extent of realization or realizability of the purported effects of affirmative action in HE and of increased diversity in the (…)

by Nabanipa Bhattacharjee and Manish Thakur *
Under the section “Effective Governance and Leadership for Higher Education Institutions”, the National Education Policy 2020 (hereafter NEP 2020) makes eight references to the Board(s) of Governors (hereafter BoG) of Indian higher educational institutions within a space of two paragraphs. A careful reading of this section reveals the front-staging of the BoGs as effective antidotes to the hitherto ‘heavy-handed’ and bureaucratic regulation of (…)

by Monika
Abstract:
[gris]The paper argues that when looking at law as literature, the style of writing a judgement is not merely, as can be considered for literature otherwise, a result of the creativity, predisposition or the literary imagination of a judge as an author but is rather circumscribed (if not determined) by the immediate context or the social imagination they speak to and operate in. The leeway to be verbose, the literary flair, the use of rhetoric and sharp convictions (…)

by Sukumaran C.V.
Teesta Setalvad and her husband Javed Anand are the editors of the monthly magazine Communalism Combat. The March-April 2002 issue of the monthly was titled as "Genocide: Gujarat 2002". The Editors’ Note of that issue of the CC says:
"The torching of bogey S-6 of the Ahmedabad-bound Sabarmati Express at Godhra on February 27, in which 58 passengers, including 26 women and 12 children, were burnt to death, is an unpardonable act. The perpetrators of this grossly inhuman (…)