December 23, 2006

Mapping Eleventh Five-Year Plan from the Girl Child’s Perspective Our country is on the threshold of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan. This is a good moment for some serious thought on whom it is being designed to serve and benefit. One deserving group at risk of being cheated of a fair deal is the girl child. The Plan approach is all about rapid-result strategies to produce skilled manpower for the ‘knowledge economy’ goals being set for the coming five years. A perceived world supply (…)

Political participation of Indian women, though in a miniature form, started with the freedom movement. Mahatma Gandhi was mostly instrumental for arousing political consciousness in the poor, illiterate women and making them take part in the freedom movement.
Political participation may be defined as voluntary participation in political affairs through membership, voting and partaking in the activities of the political parties, legislative bodies and/or politically motivated (…)

Kolkata’s Bengali daily, Dainik Statesman, on the happenings in the State. In the following piece she exposes the role of the powers that be in attempting to destroy Tagore’s Santiniketan—once again in the name of ‘development’, the word the State CM has been continually employing to defend the indefensible actions of his government in Singur. We are reproducing it with due acknowledgement. (…)

Marxists did—and to some extent in certain respects, could, reasonably—boast of advanced thinking, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today’s “Marxists” have become so myopic as to be devoid of the perspective of equitable and sustainable development even in commonplace terms. The context of “global warming” is beyond their ken even though its shadow is lengthening all over the world, West Bengal not excluded.
On the question of equity, the Communists have been in the (…)

Hardselling Capitalist Globalisation in the name of Left Alternative
Several thousand police and paramilitary forces are now roaming Singur and adjoining areas in Hooghly district, West Bengal. On December 2, they fired tear gas and rubber bullets at villagers and a few outside supporters who had gone to the area. Television channels, so far strongly supportive of the moves of the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee Government, now found themselves projecting a story totally at variance with the (…)

As the Chairman of the Bihar Land Reforms Commission, I had the opportunity to revisit Madhubani on November 14-15, 2006. The time gap between the first and the second visit was over three decades. A piece on the first trip to Madhubani was published in Mainstream sometime in 1973. The present one is a ‘Post Script’.
Infrastructure-wise Madhubani remains as backward as before. The road distance between Patna and Madhubani is 160 km. The road conditions are so bad that it takes over seven (…)

The following paper—published in Mainstream (June 2, 1973)—was prepared for the Land Reforms Division, Planning Commission, and the Working Group on Land Reforms, National Commission on Agriculture, New Delhi on the basis of a field trip to Madhubani and Muzaffarpur in Bihar in April 1973 by a Visiting Group consisting of Dr Z.A. Ahmed MP (CPI), Krishan Kant MP (Congress), Era Sezhiyan MP (DMK), A.K.K. Nambiar (Revenue Secretary, Kerala Government), S.K. Mitra (Joint Director, National (…)