2023

The Editors Guild of India
PRESS STATEMENT
3rd April, 2023
The Editors Guild of India is deeply concerned about the arbitrary suspension of social media accounts of several journalists and media organisations in Punjab over the last few days. The official Twitter account of BBC Punjabi was withheld on March 27, though it was restored later in the day. Similarly, social media accounts of a senior staffer at the Indian Express as well as some other prominent journalists were also (…)

Date: 07.04.2023
The recent decision of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to drop entire chapters from the history textbooks for class 12, as well as from other classes and to delete statements from other textbooks is a matter of deep concern. Using the period of the pandemic-cum-lockdowns to argue that there was a need to lighten the load of the curriculum, the NCERT initiated a contentious process of dropping topics like the history of the Mughal courts, (…)

Communist Party of India (Marxist)
Date: April 6, 2023
The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued the following statement:
The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) strongly condemns the efforts by the government to change the syllabus of history through the NCERT text books.
The NCERT chief’s specious argument that this has been done to rationalize the syllabus and reduce the burden on the students is totally misleading and is part of a (…)

Not natural but development policy-induced disasters in the Himalaya!
Solidarity with the ongoing struggle for justice and accountability in Joshimath!
A call for a campaign to defend nature and people from destructive development!
Towards an ecosystem-based human rights approach to development!
We as representatives of diverse social and environmental groups from across the country express grief and concern for the people of Joshimath, facing forced displacement from their homes in (…)

BOOK REVIEW
by Deepti Mehrotra __0__
Japanese Management, Indian Resistance: The Struggles of the Maruti Suzuki Workers By Anjali Deshpande and Nandita Haksar
Speaking Tiger, Harper Collins https://speakingtigerbooks.com/ 2023 / 366 pages ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9354474446 | ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9354474446 __0__
Real Stories: Behind the scenes
Maruti Suzuki workers have been in the public eye, largely due to the death of a manager, on 18 July 2012. Worker-management tension seemed to snowball (…)

BOOK REVIEW The Book Beautiful: A Memoir of Collecting Rare and Fine Books
by Pradeep Sebastian
Hachette India Pages: 306; Price: Rs 699
Bengaluru-based Pradeep Sebastian would have remained a simple bibliophile who venerated bookshops all his life until he began came across books the likes of which he had never seen or handled earlier. And so was born, around 2015, a no-doubt costly but immensely satisfying hobby of chasing and collecting rare and fine books in a (…)

* China through the Lens of Two Doctors and Two Pandemics | Chathukulam and Joseph
* Big Questions Over India’s ‘Green Hydrogen’ Mission | Singh & Pirani
* Joint statement by Burma resistance on the situation of Burmese refugees in Manipur, India - 2 March 2023

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, Apr 1, 2023
BJP, India’s ruling party is in the regular business of using religion for political purposes and setting tensions here and there while targeting minorities. Some of this is made to happen during religious festivals. So, much like last year, this week too a very aggressive and noisy religiopolitical reverie has been on, where gun totting, abuse spewing, angry activists of the Hindutva far right could be seen, some barged into Sufi religious (…)

Abstract
The 2003 SARS and the latest Covid 19 pandemic underlined the need to adopt a participatory democratic framework in authoritarian regimes like China. This article looks into how the authoritarian political system in a way failed authoritarian states like China when it comes to epidemic and pandemic management through the perspective of two doctors and two pandemics.
Introduction
On March 11, 2023, Jiang Yanyong, the Chinese military doctor who exposed the truth regarding the (…)

There’s so much fanfare around green hydrogen in the ruling establishment and among clean energy hawks, but what is being missed is the problems associated with hydrogen being treated as an alternative to fossil fuels and the viability of the process involved in obtaining green hydrogen.
Given the climate emergency our planet is facing, with accelerating global heating and devastating bio-diversity loss, any initiative by a government which proclaims its aim as ‘greening the economy’ (…)