Atin Basu presents a novel argument against the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal- a short but very stimulating post. And his argument, in my view, is perhaps the most convincing i’ve read until now.
So who will it make more powerful? The ruling elites. Who are these ruling elites? The ritualistic brahminical upper castes — irrespective of political [...]
Archive for the 'Policy' Category
Why the nuclear deal promotes evil
Published by May 13th, 2008 in Caste, Geopolitics, Policy and Politics. 0 CommentsSacrificing the brain dead
Published by May 8th, 2008 in Health, Human Rights and Policy. 0 CommentsMagesh probes the issue of organ transplantation: aren’t the ‘brain’ dead going to suffer if they’re clubbed together with the ‘dead’ dead?
A chennai doctor has opined that sensitizing the public on cadaver transplantation for organs like kidney would greatly address the large imbalance in the demand and supply(Ah..well, thats the kind of language they speak) [...]
Women’s reservations bill
Published by May 7th, 2008 in Democracy, India, Patriarchy, Policy, Politics and Women. 0 CommentsSome early reactions:
Premasri asks- who represents Indian women?
On average, Indian women work longer hours than men, as their day consists of a more diverse array of tasks relating both to the maintenance of their livelihoods (public sphere) and homes (domestic sphere). In rural India, this could take the form of both working in the fields [...]
Bush, India and global food prices
Published by May 5th, 2008 in Economy, Food, Globalisation, India, Media, Policy and Politics. 1 CommentRay Titus finds nothing wrong with what Bush said:
What the President was an economic fact. There was no ‘blame’, in fact his statement was a compliment to a country that is demanding better products and services for consumption. Judge for yourselves.
Arun checks reactions from across the world, including a news report from Arab News, which [...]
GM mosquitoes and ‘their’ policy making
Published by May 2nd, 2008 in Development, Economy, Environment, Government, Health, India, Policy and Poverty. 0 CommentsPrasanth at ‘The Daily Pheesh’ expresses skepticism (informed) at the eradication of diseases through GM (genetically modified) mosquitoes.
GM mosquitoes may be useful or harmful but one cannot deny that their introduction is nothing but a stopgap response to mistakes that were committed much earlier—failures in planning and managing cities, failures in taking health care to rural areas and [...]
Mandal lives!
Published by April 11th, 2008 in Caste, Human Rights, India, Justice, Policy, Politics, Prejudice, Society and public space. 6 Comments I started out with the intention of linking to both sides: blogs that oppose reservations and those which support them. Less than two pages of Google Blog Search results yielded these reactions:
Jasdeep feels reservations won’t undo the damage done by a poor public education system:
Revolutionary changes needs to be done in Education system, But [...]
Per capita expenditure on education, healthcare and a thousand other statistics that look respectable, by international standards, on the surface: but do they tell us the whole story on how much or how little the government is doing for all of the 1.1 billion people in the country? Abhishek checks the per capita deception in [...]
The fallacy of school choice
Published by April 3rd, 2008 in Democracy, Education, Human Rights, Policy, Politics, Poverty and Theory. 0 CommentsDweep Chanana joins the debate on privatization of education and vouchers:
The argument for privatization is at once political and ideological. It is political because it reflects how societies feel about the role of the state in providing “public” services such as healthcare and education. It is ideological because proponents often supplement demands for privatization [...]
Science, State, Market, Society, Caste, Gender…
Published by April 1st, 2008 in Capitalism, Caste, Development, Economy, Policy, Poverty, Science & Technology and Society. 0 CommentsMelkote attends a talk titled ‘Science, State, Market, Society and Ecology’ and thinks: ‘the problem with science and technology in India seems to be that their main focus is either the State or the Market’.
The market angle is even more apparent: our best minds working to solve problems which will make sharper videos, clearer sound, [...]
Common School System
Published by March 31st, 2008 in Education, History, Human Rights, India, Policy, Politics and Poverty. 0 CommentsAnil Sadagopal advocates a Common School System:
The role of Common School System in forging a sense of common citizenship and nationhood is yet to be appreciated. This becomes a critical nation-building function in a geo-culturally diverse country like India. How can the present multi-layered school system fulfill this requirement? Today, the school system is like [...]
A walk down the Red Corridor
Published by March 30th, 2008 in Activism, Capitalism, Democracy, Development, Economy, Human Rights, India, Policy, Politics, Poverty and South Asia. 0 CommentsFire on the Mountain has been posting a series of in-depth interviews with revolutionaries from South Asia. The interviews, it appears, were conducted by the Norwegian Revolutionary Socialist party (Red!) for their party magazine. The first of the interviews, with G.N.Saibaba, Deputy Secretary of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF), an All Indian Federation of [...]
Trivandrum - raising development
Published by March 28th, 2008 in Development, Education, Globalisation and Policy. 1 CommentNow that its summer vacation, everyone is posting about the city. And summer vacation is afterall about wish-lists, nostalgia and planning to have a nice time.
Ajay at TvmRising does an incisive analysis of the Singapore model and lays out a way forward for urban development in Trivandrum using its strategic location like Singapore.
In the 1950s [...]
Poverty is a political issue
Published by March 27th, 2008 in Adivasi, Caste, Dalit, Development, Economy, Human Rights, Policy, Politics, Poverty and Religion. 0 CommentsAnalysing a paper published in the Economic and Political Weekly, John Samuel suggests poverty isn’t just about incomes, it is also about identities :
The notion of impoverisation (or the process of the active creation of poverty with in society or economy) needs to be seen in the context of social, economic and political inequality. Such [...]
Why is Modern India Vegetarian?
Published by March 24th, 2008 in Adivasi, Caste, Dalit, Economy, Food, Government, Policy, Poverty and Religion. 0 Comments41.9% of adults belonging to the ST and 38.4 % belonging to SCs have Chronic Energy Deficiency, while the pooled average of the nation is 34.8 %. Further, 62.7 % of the children born to Scheduled Caste parents are under-weight, 57.6 % are stunted, while among the other castes it the numbers are 53.1 % [...]
Shariah in the West
Published by March 21st, 2008 in Human Rights, Justice, Patriarchy, Policy, Religion, Secularism and Women. 0 CommentsAsghar Ali Engineer foresees conflict between conservative ‘ulama and progressive Muslims if Shariah laws are applied in the West:
I have met many ‘ulama in UK. They are as conservative as in Islamic countries, perhaps even more in the alien environment of UK and other Western countries. If any attempt is made to apply Islamic [...]
Naxalism and conventional politics
Published by March 18th, 2008 in Adivasi, Dalit, Democracy, Development, Government, Human Rights, Justice, Policy, Politics and Poverty. 0 CommentsGautam Sen says he doesn’t support Naxalism but he doesn’t seem to believe in the efficacy of ‘conventional politics’ either:
Despite these differences, my answer to my brother’s imprisonment is not the advocacy of violence. It is a waning and tenuous hope that perhaps the system does work, as Pai thinks it does. Perhaps my brother [...]
Random bloggers’ reactions to the budget from Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad
Published by March 1st, 2008 in Blogging, India, Personal, Policy and Society. 1 CommentVatsan, expressing some discontent from Chennai, takes a dig at MK and PC:
This is once again a mere number. If I am not wrong, a few years back the number was as high as Rs 1000 crores. And now an additional Rs 300 crores. But what happens to the money? Well Since our local government [...]
Budget 2008
Published by March 1st, 2008 in Business, Democracy, Development, Economy, Education, Government, Health, India, Policy, Politics and Regulation. 0 CommentsJagdish Madan in a pre-budget summing up of the economic and political situation in the country, looks at some crucial issues:
…rural employment plan, which guarantees 100 days of work for one person in every poor household, was the priority of the government. The plan was the government’s attempt to address some of the countryside’s biggest [...]
The Growth ‘Miracle’
Published by February 27th, 2008 in Development, Economy, Education, History, Policy, Spotlight Series and Theory. 0 Comments[ This is Essay # 20 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for the archives.]
The Growth ‘Miracle’
——————-
Shromon Das
‘Growth’ is an issue that gains importance in almost any context; firms worrying about business growth, teenagers worrying about how tall they can grow, and of course, economists worrying about economic growth. One of the most fascinating case [...]
Whither Prosperity?
Published by February 26th, 2008 in Democracy, Development, Economy, Education, Geopolitics, Globalisation, Government, India, Indiaspora, Policy, Poverty and South Asia. 1 CommentUnable to defend himself from a Singaporean hotelier’s comments, Swaroop seeks out answers at Churumuri. Illustrating with real examples, he rakes up enormous dirt on a gamut of issues.
Education. Immigration. Public Safety. Harassment. Rowdyism and brawn. Health services. Bribery. Brain drain.
He concludes his comparison of India to Singapore (unthinkable by size, but still) with an interesting analogy to claims [...]
Blaming Capitalism
Published by February 25th, 2008 in Capitalism, Democracy, Development, Economy, Media and Policy. 1 CommentRohit reacts to an article in Economic and Political Weekly:
One of the constant themes of public debate in India is to link the post 1991 reforms to problems faced by the Indian society. According to this intellectually lazy line of thinking, capitalism is responsible for all of India’s social and economic challenges. That despite reforms, [...]
Raval makes a call for Purna Swaraj on the present state of affairs,
We need the independence that the protagonists of our freedom struggle left for us. It is our right and the time has come to stand up to claim it, to stand up for our beliefs, to stand up for what we believe [...]
Rural Poor- Human Rights, Inhuman State?
Published by February 22nd, 2008 in Adivasi, Business, Caste, Community, Culture, Dalit, Democracy, Development, Environment, Human Rights, India, Justice, Policy, Poverty and Spotlight Series. 7 Comments[ This is Essay # 18 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for the archives.]
Rural Poor- Human Rights, Inhuman State?
Theory and Practice in a Liberal Democracy
———————————
Rahul Banerjee
Over the past two years or so the normally un-newsworthy rural poor in India have time and again made the headlines with their vehement opposition to the forced acquisition [...]
India and the Politics of Climate Change Negotiations
Published by February 20th, 2008 in Development, Economy, Energy, Environment, Geopolitics, India, Policy and Spotlight Series. 1 Comment[ This is Essay # 17 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for the archives.]
India and the Politics of Climate Change Negotiations
—————————————————–
Dweep
The Bali Conference on climate change concluded last December much as had been expected – with no real agreement on a post-Kyoto framework. Throughout the discussions India maintained its principled stance of a [...]
Follow the Chinese path?
Published by February 18th, 2008 in Books, Culture, Development, Economy, Government, India and Policy. 3 CommentsIn a well-argued post, Fellow Blogbhartian Bhupinder reviews Sagarika Ghose’s “Farming the Colonial Dream” and questions the premise of doing away with agriculture in India and walking the Chinese path.
She ignores what is practically an urban nightmare in China. Overwhelming migration from rural areas, a reversal of the 1960s forced migration, has led to increasing [...]
Recent Comments