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Environment
Featured Stories
India
Deconstructing Assam – Mizoram Border Clash
Most people in India do not know that the majority of the states in Northeast India were once part of the undivided province of Assam during Brtish colonial rule. Several of them also happen to be in the most earth-quake prone zone(zone 5) of the world.But the gruesome recent violence at Assam-Mizo border also forces us to recognize it as[Read More…]
COVID Response Watch
Vaccination among women 11% lower than in men in Madhya Pradesh
Bhopal: “I don’t want to take the vaccine as I have read on social media that I will not be able to bear a child,” said Rekha (name changed on request). The 22 year old, is a resident of Bhopal, the state capital of Madhya Pradesh, who fears that she will have grave side effects after vaccination that will render[Read More…]
World
Afghanistan, Failure and Second Thoughts
It is a country other powers simply cannot leave alone. Even after abandoning its Kabul post in ignominy, tail tucked between their legs, Australia is now wondering if it should return – in some form. The Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs has been sending out a few signals, none of them definitive. “We will not comment on intelligence matters,”[Read More…]
Globalisation
The Future of Work
by Thomas Klikauer and Meg Young It has been said many times that predicting the future is hard. Understanding this, the Nobel Laureate and father of the atomic model Niels Bohr once said, prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future! Just two prediction into the future of work show how such prophecies can go spectacularly wrong even[Read More…]
Human Rights
Corruption of Police Devastates Human Lives
by Advocate Mohammad Shoaib and Sandeep Pandey That corruption is rampant in police department is a common experience. However, there is another form of corruption which devastates lives of individuals and their families. It has now emerged as a common phenomenon that police more often than not register false cases because of which individuals have to spend number of years[Read More…]
Imperialism
Failed Empire?
It was all so long ago, in a world seemingly without challengers. Do you even remember when we Americans lived on a planet with a recumbent Russia, a barely rising China, and no obvious foes except what later came to be known as an “axis of evil,” three countries then incapable of endangering this one? Oh, and, as it turned[Read More…]
Communal Harmony
Religion, Sectarian Nationalism and Interfaith Marriages
One Hindu woman in Kanpur, UP lodged a complaint against her Muslim husband on the charge that he forcibly converted her. As it turned out she was forced to sign the FIR by Hindutva groups and she went to the police station, turned hostile and stated that the aggressive Hindu nationalist groups had forced her to file the complaint. Betwa[Read More…]
Climate Change
We Cannot Go on Like This: Merkel Says on Tackling Climate Crisis After Floods
Less than three months before leaving office, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has openly conceded that the industrial world has failed to adequately fight climate change and that more rapid, pain-inducing steps were urgently needed. Media reports said: Merkel, who has led Europe’s largest economy and one of the world’s leading emitters of CO2 for the last 16 years, reflected on her own bitter experience.[Read More…]
Environmental Protection
Why Landslides Are Becoming More Frequent and Destructive
Landslides are becoming increasingly frequent and destructive, and the last week of July 2021 has been particularly worrying in India in this context as within the span of a few days in Maharashtra, Western Ghats and Himalayan region landslides claimed over a 100 human lives. This is part of a rising trend of landslides becoming more destructive in India as[Read More…]
Counter Solutions
The Existential Question of Our Age
Here is the existential question of our Age: Is there a way for us to break out of our downward ecological spiral? The answer: Yes. But first we will have to examine all of those existing patterns of our thought and behavior we have believed to contain “inherent truths” that are now an existential threat; our lifestyles, our economics, our political systems,[Read More…]
Resource Crisis
Solidarity with Resistance to Extraction
by Don Fitz and the Green Party of St. Louis People the world over are opposing fossil fuel extraction in an incalculable number of ways. It is now clear that burning fossil fuels threatens millions of Life forms and could be laying the foundation for the extermination of Humanity. But what about “alternative” energy? As progressives stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those[Read More…]
Patriarchy
Why caste matters: On Dowry deaths in Kerala
by Karthika Jayakumar and Sivakami Recent events have coerced Keralites to reflect on the façade of progressiveness borne so proudly by the State. Lauded for its development experience, the continued prevalence of crimes like dowry deaths are reminders of the skewed power structures and deep-rooted patriarchy that has a stronghold here. The tipping point was on June 21, when 24-year-old[Read More…]
Palestine
Don’t Cry For Lifta: Palestinians Will Endure
Don’t Cry For Lifta: Palestinians Will Endure – There will never be a movie made titled “The Last of the Palestinians!” “The Jerusalem landscape seen through the ruins of a house at Lifta, 2017” — World Monuments Fund The last thing Palestinians need is to come to terms in sorrow with our dispossession at the hands of the apartheid, settler-colonial Jewish state.[Read More…]
South Asia
Pakistan’s geo-economics is working well
Nine Chinese citizens were killed after a bus carrying them plunged into a ravine following an explosion in Pakistan’s far north Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, July 14, 2021… When the whole world is lamenting that the US is quitting Afghanistan in ignominy, the Biden Administration is snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. What an audacity of hope! The new QUAD will[Read More…]
Annihilate Caste
Plight of migrant workers in Gujarat during April-June, 2021 lockdown
To Shri Apurva Chandra Union Labour Secretary Dear Shri Apurva Chandra, The preamble to the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979 defines its primary objective to be “to regulate the employment of interstate migrant workmen and to provide for their conditions of service and for matters connected therewith“. This Act is by and large[Read More…]
Life/Philosophy
Expanding the buffet of choices for preventing HIV
Great strides have been made in HIV prevention, treatment and care, since the first case of the viral infection was reported 40 years ago. Thanks to the untiring efforts of the HIV community, activists, and medical fraternity, 74% (27.5 million) of the 37.7 million people living with HIV are able to access the lifesaving antiretroviral therapy today. But the governments’[Read More…]
Arts/Literature
Sarpatta Parambarai – A straw drawn from the Children of Ghetto
Watching Sarpatta Parambarai is a social necessity and celebration. The primary message conveyed here is don’t turn back from things that are real and painful to you. Perseverance is the life of Untouchable to taste success. India has produced and silver screened only two type of movies since independence. They are of two categories namely: Caste mongering movies Caste ignoring[Read More…]
Book Review
After the Apocalypse – America’s Role in a World Transformed
After the Apocalypse – America’s Role in a World Transformed. Andrew Bacevich. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. New York. 2021. The contemporary apocalypse as seen by Andrew Bacevich in his latest book, “After the Apocalypse”, consists of four different horsemen: first mentioned are the severe climate effects of global warming; Trump “toxic and divisive” presidency is mentioned next; followed[Read More…]
