South Asia Citizens Web

The construction of a new high-speed railway line in India is scheduled to officially get underway this year, connecting the commercial capital of Mumbai and the industrial city of Ahmedabad in the western part of the country. The project to build the line fashioned after Japan’s shinkansen system is a product of an agreement between Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, in their December 2015 summit.

Yet anxiety is already rising due to soaring costs brought about by haphazard policies of the Indian government, leading both the Japanese government and Japanese firms to start getting bogged down.

Madeeha Gauhar’s passing is not just the end of what will probably be considered the golden age of Pakistani theatre, it is a great loss for progressive, pro-peace voices in this country.

The renewed push to decriminalise homosexuality – more than four years after the Supreme Court judgment upholding Section 377 of Indian Penal Code – raises hopes of a positive outcome. In 2009, Delhi high court had ruled in favour of the personal choices and individual liberties of homosexual persons, but it proved to be short-lived with the Supreme Court upholding Section 377 in 2013.

We are academics and independent scholars from India and abroad, writing to express solidarity with, and to endorse the sentiments expressed by, forty-nine retired civil servants in their open letter to you of April 16th 2018

The collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory complex near Dhaka in April 2013—killing 1,132 souls and injuring nearly 2,000 more—is unquestionably the most horrific human tragedy in garment industry world history. Whether this enormous loss of life will be balanced by a new era of social reform remains an open question. But it seems just possible that Rana Plaza may well represent the same sort of moral and political shock to an exploitative and dysfunctional production system as did the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City, which ushered in a generation of social reform and labor rights.