South Asia Citizens Web

The turbulence and turmoil that has haunted Kashmir for the past twenty-three years holds all of us, as a people, accountable for the degeneration of our politics and society. While it is important for us to condemn, question, and seek redress for the human rights violations in Kashmir, it is also important for us to construct a politics that will enable the rebuilding of our pluralistic polity and society.

Punjab assembly recently passed a bill for an addition to IPC clause 295 to give life imprisonment for any ‘injury, damage or sacrilege’ of four religious books, (Guru Granth Sahib, Koran, Bible and Geeta) ‘with the intention to hurt the religious feelings of the people’. This is the first time in independent India that a punishment usually given for willfully murdering another human being has been recommended for defilement of religious books. ... The bill shifts the constitutional balance between fundamental rights of freedom of expression and religion on the one side and the powers of the sate machinery and organized social bodies to restrain these rights on the other.

24th Sunanda Bhandare Memorial lecture was delivered by Nayantara Sahgal, the distinguished writer and public figure in India. The lecture was held at the India International Centre, in New Delhi on the 9th of October 2018. This recording was made in public interest by sacw.net a the non profit public archive and website.

Informality in the formal sector: Evidence from Indian manufacturing by Radhicka Kapoor and P.P. Krishnapriya, International Growth Centre Working Paper, April 2017
Deconstructing India’s Employment Demarche: Informalisation of labour is more a matter of political manoeuvring than economic choice (editorial, EPW, 1 Sept 2018)

Environmentalists have pointed out that the Kerala government’s willingness to allow quarrying and indiscriminate construction even in environmentally sensitive zones, created the conditions for the landslides that devastated several areas