South Asia Citizens Web

Half of Tirupur’s 3-4 lakh workers are migrants and many, says C Murthy, general secretary of the CITU-affiliated Tirupur Banian Central Workers’ Union, returned to their villages when they could not find work that would support the high cost of living in a city. For those still with jobs, three processes are clearly evident: contractualisation, sub-contracting and outsourcing.

Hazaribagh’s tanneries flood the environment with harmful chemicals. While the government takes a hands-off approach, local residents fall sick and workers suffer daily from their exposure to harmful tannery chemicals.

The book is a critique of ‘Islamic science’, which I find an exclusivist and essentialist project. There are people in the Euro-American universities who are trying to project a category called Islamic Science, which according to them, is a counter to Eurocentrism. Science, unfortunately, spread into the non-European world as part of the colonial baggage. For example, in India or South Asia, it came as part of the colonial empire.

Instead of building a political vocabulary based on citizenship, the republic degenerated into a series of political claims based on identity. Not giving offence to these identities was valorised as a means of engaging with the tide of hate washing across India. The defenders of M.F. Husain, for example, were compelled to argue that his paintings were deeply respectful of the Hindu tradition — not that he was entitled to offend who he chose.

We, as economists, academics and social activists are deeply concerned about the continuing crisis in the education sector in Sri Lanka. Austerity measures and attacks on social welfare in many countries have been disenfranchising children and youth from education as a central avenue for social equity. This has led to protests and social unrest in many countries across the board. In decades past, we saw social and human development with free education and health in Sri Lanka, to be a model worthy of emulation by other countries. But insurrections, civil war, increasing militarisation and authoritarianism over the years, have made a deep dent in the democratic structure of society.