South Asia Citizens Web

An event in Bangalore aimed at exploring the role of art and literature in a conflict zone is cancelled after Hindu right-wing group calls it anti-national and incites people to disrupt meet

India’s former President APJ Abdul Kalam brought himself no credit by visiting the Koodankulam nuclear power project in Tamil Nadu, and declaring it "100 percent safe". The idea that any technology, especially a complex hazard-prone one like a nuclear power, is "100 percent safe" is patently unscientific. All technologies carry finite risks. The more complicated, energy-dense, and dependent on high-pressure high-temperature systems they are, the higher the risk.

The CNDP deeply condoles the untimely death of J. Sri Raman (in Kochi on 7th November), a distinguished founder member who remained a frontranking campaigner until the very end. An eminent journalist and highly felicitous writer, he will be remembered above all as a pre-eminent peace activist in the Sub-Continent who viewed communal harmony at home as key to India-Pakistan friendship as well as the elimination of the region’s nuclear weapons. Little wonder then that Sri Raman should have waged the many battles for peace simultaneously on several fronts.

Indeed, India is a pluralistic society. But it has a long way to go before it can be considered "secular," a word written within the preamble of the constitution.

Quite like prisoners whose biometric data like finger prints can be collected only under the Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920, it is quite outrageous that National Population Register (NPR) is taking biometric data of every resident and citizen of India disregarding absence of any legislative mandate for it.