Counterview.in

  It was the second time I visited a temporary museum in Raleigh, a major city in North Carolina , south of Washington, D.C. The visit was primarily meant to be an educational experience for an eight-year-old girl I happen to know intimately. She displayed an unusual curiosity, but what interested me even more was the manner in which both young and elderly people, high school children and experts, seemed extraordinarily keen to tell children about the insects on display .

  In a deeply reflective conversation on Episode 13 of the Unmute podcast, veteran Dalit rights activist, lawyer, and founder of Navsarjan , Martin Macwan , dissected the anatomy of social resistance, the pervasive nature of caste , and the future of human rights movements in India. 

For nearly a decade, the database at Land Conflict Watch has carried a certain bleakness. It is a cold, hard accounting of the costs of resource extraction, the toll “development” takes on the most vulnerable, and the ugly consequences of unchecked private consumption. Within this grim arithmetic of over 1,095 mapped land conflicts, one statistic stands out: nearly 80% of these disputes occur over common lands . 

Persistent caste discrimination , the marginalisation of Dalits , concerns over the rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples , and the treatment of religious and ethnic minorities are among the issues flagged by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in its latest observations on India.

  The advocacy group Nutrition Advocacy for Public Interest (NAPi) has rejected as inadequate and evasive the response it received from the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) to its August demand for a ban on junk food advertising , saying the government's reply sidesteps every substantive demand raised by the country's leading doctors and public health experts.

  The other day, I was talking with a non-resident Indian (NRI) in a middle-level city off the eastern coast of the United States. The tête-à-tête took place as we were returning from a religious ceremony at a well-established Hindu temple, where several hundred NRIs had participated, many of them actively.