One more blood-drenched road accident. Another soul-numbing statistic. A drunken man, driving at night at crazy speeds, loses control, lunges on to a road divider, crushing 13 sleeping men. Newspapers report, the driver is arrested but released on bail next day.
The country is ostensibly in the throes of a great social movement for sanitation. Gandhi’s name is evoked, Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads from the front, ministers lift brooms for cameras, and officers, college and school children take oaths against littering and to clean their surroundings.
The majority of children in the world who are trapped in labour instead of going to school are born and raised in India. The surprise but welcome Nobel for an indefatigable Indian warrior against child labour…
How much money does a poor person need to survive with elementary human dignity? And have these numbers rapidly come down in the recent years that coincide with high economic growth?
Even with many shortcomings the mid-day meal scheme is still the best implemented of all social programmes, comparing favourably to the public distribution system, the Integrated Child Development Services scheme and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.
The debates around the national food security Bill—which will create legal duties for the state to provide food to citizens—have become overheated and often deeply polarized.
Among free India’s gravest failures—along with its inability to end hunger, pervasive poverty and discrimination—is the continued targeting of people with violence and arson only because of their faith or caste.