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Poverty/Inequality

Poverty/Inequality

Ignored health risks, bungled pilot projects, bonanza for Dutch firm: Modi Govt. forces fortified rice on poor

26th May 2023

Modi government rushed with its plan to supply fortified rice despite internal and external expert warnings on the adverse effects of feeding it to people, particularly children. Niti Aayog reviewed the pilot studies in seven districts across India only after the government’s orders to distribute fortified rice had already been passed. It found that all of them were fundamentally flawed and had failed. The report was never made public while the government continues to push fortified rice.

Author (with spectacles) at Narmada Sangharsh Yatra (Struggle Journey), 1990

Photo by Shailendra Yashwant

It did not stop the dam, but is it a failure?

23rd February 2023

The many faces of India’s Narmada movement: Since the mid-1980s, the Narmada valley has also been the site of one of Independent India’s most iconic and globally well-known people’s movements, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement). For the last nearly 40 years, this movement has raised questions about and tried to stop, a series of mega-dams along the river and its tributaries.

Charles Eisenstein: The Coronation

16th May 2020

For years, normality has been stretched nearly to breaking-point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that it’s snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids, to see what we might weave from them?…

Visakhapatnam gas leak accident: A preliminary modelling study

15th May 2020

At least 13 people have been killed and nearly 1000 others hospitalised following a massive leak of styrene gas from the LG Polymers plant in the city of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. Here is a preliminary modelling study of one of the worst industrial accidents in recent times by Sagar Dhara and K Babu Rao….

Representative pic

The Hindu

Ahead of ‘Day Zero’, Delhi’s water crisis is about to turn into a water war

4th February 2020

From ABC News: Delhi is one of 21 Indian cities that could run out of groundwater, according to a 2018 government thinktank report. Disputes over water often lead to violence, especially in the city’s unauthorised settlements. The state government and the local “water mafia” are drilling bores, further depleting groundwater and exacerbating the larger problem….

A $5 trillion economy for India: At what cost?

14th January 2020

PM Narendra Modi wants India to be a “$5 trillion economy” by 2024. The consequences of such high GDP growth –even setting aside questions regarding its distribution or true worth– will result in depriving the dispossessed sections of society of access even to natural resources, while driving fragile ecologies to a point of no return….

Mihir Shah: India’s water crisis has a simple solution

18th December 2019

“This plan has multiple win-wins: Improvement in soil and water quality, higher incomes for farmers, reduced malnutrition and obesity, and a simple solution to India’s water problem by drastically reducing use of water in agriculture.” Also watch: ‘Bringing the Science Back Into Water: A New Paradigm for 21st Century India,’ a talk by Mihir Shah….

Representative pic

Beggars as choosers: Why India’s poor opt to beg

6th December 2019

Beggars are usually ignored on the streets and questions are asked about why they don’t work. But many have indeed worked as paid labour and have chosen begging as the primary activity, finds Sabina Yasmin Rahman. As India’s urban and rural poor reel from a state-made economic crisis, this revealing study takes on an urgent relevance….

The Hindu

How caste shapes water conflicts in drought-ridden Maharashtra

27th November 2019

Anuj Ghanekar writes: Drought affects everyone, but the Dalits are the worst affected. They often become targets of threats and violence in different ways if they try to access water or demand rights for water, with several atrocities on record. One study noted several instances where water sources used by Dalits were deliberately contaminated with human excreta….

The ‘Economics Nobel’ winners’ triumph is at the expense of the world’s poor

21st October 2019

Sanjay Reddy writes: The administration of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) – which Nobel prize winners Duflot and Banerjee helped pioneer – has suffered from more than a whiff of neocolonial attitudes. Arguably, all of the difficulties of RCTs stem from a single source: a failure to recognize the full personhood of those who are affected by interventions….

Mayank Aggarwal/Mongabay

The invisible victims of an unfinished city

15th October 2019

From Mongabay India: First envisaged in the early 2000s, Lavasa was touted as independent India’s first privately owned hill city. But over the years, the project faced numerous legal cases of usurping the land of villagers and violating environmental conditions. It’s now a ghost town with empty, unfinished construction or buildings vacated by their occupants….

Catastrophic climate change is not a problem for Fascists — It is a solution

23rd September 2019

Umair Haque writes: The tables have turned. The problem isn’t climate change anymore, and the solution isn’t global cooperation — given today’s implosive politics. The problem is you — if you are not one of the chosen, predatory few. And the solution to the problem of you is climate change. To the fascists, that is….

Mahul, Mumbai: Unfit for human habitation

20th September 2019

From Vice.com: “When we go to private hospitals outside, they immediately tell us that the only way to survive is to leave the area. But the doctors here tell us there’s nothing wrong. Are they saying doctors outside this area are all mad? Are the researchers who’ve declared this place unfit mad?” asks Farah Sheikh….

P. Sainath: How a patch of Anantapur came to be a desert

28th July 2019

From The Wire: This specific patch of some 1,000 acres near Dargah Honnur village in Anantapur district –once covered by millet cultivation– has over many decades become more and more a desert. That has been driven by often paradoxical factors –and created the kind of space that filmmakers send out location scouts to look for….

‘Spiritual extractivism”: Ayahuasca, colonialism, and the death of a healer

16th July 2019

In 2018 April, a 81-year-old Peruvian indigenous healer was murdered by a Canadian man while attempting to extract her knowledge of traditional healing practices. He was in turn lynched by the local people. The sordid incident has since brought together traditional healers in the Peruvian Amazon to resist the growing threat of Western ‘spiritual extractivism’….

We have drought-proofed our cities, and left farms and farmers to die

1st July 2019

Devinder Sharma writes: This year, nearly 82% of Karnataka is reeling under drought. But in Bangalore, you won’t get even a hint of the terrible human suffering that continues to be inflicted year after year. Karnataka has suffered drought for 12 out of the past 18 years. But life in Bangalore has never been affected….

Arundhati Roy: ‘We’re lurching into an unknown future, in a blitzkrieg of idiocy’

14th May 2019

“And now, irony of ironies, a consensus is building that climate change is the world’s single largest security challenge. Increasingly the vocabulary around it is being militarized. And no doubt very soon its victims will become the ‘enemies’ in the new war without end.” (From Arundhati Roy’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture for PEN-America)…

Rahul Gandhi, President of Indian National Congress, along with Jairam Ramesh

Rahul Gandhi’s cash transfer scheme could be a revenue neutral Carbon Tax

23rd April 2019

“Carbon tax” is a tax on fossil fuels to reduce their consumption. A revenue neutral carbon tax is “the fairest, most effective, most efficient single policy tool in the fight for a habitable climate,” says Charles Komanoff. The term “revenue neutral” simply means the tax revenue is returned back to the public in some form….

Greta Thunberg’s problem. A problem without a solution?

8th April 2019

Thunberg, the face of school climate-strikes, writes, “Either we go on as a civilization, or we don’t”. But who said we must go on with this civilization? If we drop this idea, then the survival of the human species (not of the current Western civilization) is possible – with a different, yet to be fully described, kind of civilization….

Sea level rise has washed away more than 50% of Ghoramara island, Sunderbans

Daesung Lee

Taking India’s climate migrants seriously

17th March 2019

Given the scale of the problem, India’s response to climate migration has been woefully inadequate. Administrative lethargy or the lack of foresight and planning will only exacerbate the suffering and plight of climate migrants. This is particularly unjust to them, as they are least responsible for the mess we find ourselves in, writes Nandan Sharalaya…