Winter is upon us once more. Pollution, smog, and plunging temperatures transmute sleeping into a formidable daily challenge for the most dispossessed of city residents…
There can be no better encapsulation of the idea of the good state, one which must be founded on the idea of social solidarity, on the continuous mindfulness of its obligation to care for every person, weak and strong. Chomsky goes on to say that we live in times when this is considered a profoundly subversive idea.
One ‘reform’ in India’s social welfare architecture to which the current government is deeply committed is to substitute subsidised wheat and rice supplied through the public distribution system (PDS) with direct cash transfers into bank accounts of targeted households.
Winter is upon us once more. Pollution, smog and plunging temperatures transmute sleeping into a formidable daily challenge for the most dispossessed of city residents – people without homes.
Free India was born in a tumult of religious hatred. This, and the fact that this country is home to followers of almost every major religion, persuaded members of the Constituent Assembly to exercise great care to protect the freedom of religious belief in the Constitution.
“I died the day my daughter died,” her mother Asha Devi declares, disconsolate and in tears. It is hard for most of us to even imagine her pain and loss. “If I am alive today, it is only in order to secure justice for my daughter. But when the boy who raped her so brutally walks free after just three years, I feel I have failed our daughter.” Her husband Badri Singh agrees.
The fractures around the fault-lines of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ in India have again threatened to surface after the release of the 2011 religious census results.
Three merciless rapes of small children within a week in the country’s national capital, followed by the gruesome burning alive of two children in a village in Faridabad, have once again raised, with painful urgency, the question of how we can make the world safer for disadvantaged and defenceless young children.
We often assume that our greatest dangers are from strangers on dark streets or from violent men who might break into our houses.
A dominant feature of the first year of Narendra Modi’s leadership is the quiet dismantling of India’s imperfectly realised framework of welfare and rights, covertly, by stealth.