The 2018-19 budget of the Narendra Modi government has been touted as catering to interests of farmers, rural workers, women, Dalits and small businesses but nothing can be farther from truth. A strikingly paradoxical feature of this budget is the…
Adivasis seek to re-assert their traditional identity
‘Adivasi history is an unbroken chain of broken promises’ (Dr.B.D.Sharma) hence.. Adivasis seek to re-assert their traditional identity What are these broken promises? Massive displacement without rehabilitation: Independent studies estimate that about 24 lakh acres of their land has been…
TISS Students’ Movement Continues…
Tata Institutes Social Sciences Students’ Union in Mumbai released a statement on 3rd March endorsed by 5 out of 7 union members calling off the strike in all the struggling campuses (Guwahati, Tuljapur, Hyderabad) which began on 21st February. However,…
Post- Matric Scholarship and TISS strike
Tata Institute of Social Science is one of the important institutes of higher education in India. Mumbai, Hyderabad, Tuljapur and Gawahati, the four campuses of TISS, went on strike simultaneously from 21st February, against the institute’s decision to withdraw scholarship…
Andhra Pradesh: recent social movements
Immediately after the Right to Information Act was implemented in 2005, under the aegis of United Forum for Right to Information Campaign activists like Ram Krishna Raju of National Alliance of People's Movements organised camps in different districts of undivided…
Mother, weep not for me
When you came to see me I couldn’t see your face from the fibre glass window If you glanced at my crippled body you could truely believe that I am still alive Mother, cry not for my absence at home…
Union Budget: what does it have for peasants and workers?
“Will politics win over economics?” This is the commonest platitude one hears when the union budget is around the corner.If the government extracts huge tax-revenue from the ordinary people, curtails its own expenditure, economics wins. If the government distributes rice…
Updation of the NRC in Assam: what are the issues involved and what lies ahead?
On the night of 31st December, 2017 the first draft of the NRC was released in Assam. What is the NRC, why is it being updated and what politics lies behind the scene? These are some of the questions this…
Newton: a ‘New dalit hero’ or a new stereotype of dalit?
Which language should I Speak? Chewing trotters in the badlands my grandpa, the permanent resident of my body, the household of tradition heaped on his back, Wait in this evening's glow and stand still hollers at me, "You whore-son, talk…
Varanasi: brutal attack on tea vendors
The previous central government brought a Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 for protection of livelihood rights and social security of street vendors. A government press release quoting the Minister for Housing and Urban…