Currently Browsing: January 2017
Mir Sahab lives in the Irani area of Forbesganj. A small town in Bihar on the border of Nepal and Bangladesh, Forbesganj has both an Irani and Iraqi area. Mir Sahab’s ancestors had a zamindari. A victim of the Land Ceiling Act, the property of his family was seized and now belongs to the aviation […]
As I travel through Bihar, to small bustees, little villages, remote hamlets, I see pink schools everywhere, behind clusters of bamboo groves, down a mud road, near a pond. There are more than 1,000 schools in Araria district alone, and the number of children enrolled is 4,16,511. In 2006, the Indian government had named Araria […]
In a shameless hoax, India’s ruling party pushed through a legislation recently that said it was banning child labour in its first paragraph, but actually legalized 90 per cent of the country’s child labour of all ages through a clause in a later paragraph. Section 3 in clause 5 of the Child Labour (Prohibition and […]
Prejudice sometimes is more deeply embedded in our consciousness than historical fact. Recently a member of the Bawariya community in UP was accused of rape. Kiran Bedi, lieutenant governor of Puducherry and a former IPS officer, promptly tweeted: “Ex-criminal tribes are known to be very cruel. They are hardcore professionals in committing crimes. Rarely caught […]
The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2016 suffers from several flaws. At first glance, the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2016, passed last month in Parliament, seems progressive. It prohibits “the engagement of children in all occupations and of adolescents in hazardous occupations and processes” wherein adolescents refers to those under […]
Read about this woman. But think about all the rest. After the roll call of the states at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton became the candidate for President of the United States. She is the first woman to win the nomination of a major party, a milestone for America nearly a century after women […]
This is what poverty looks like in Bihar: a 10-year-old child boarding a train for big, unknown Punjab so that the food at home is enough for his Ma and Babuji. A sister postponing her wedding so that she can be the additional daily wage earner in the family. An anxious mother and father borrowing […]
Yesterday I met a woman labelled as a dayan – a witch – in the village of Balbat in Araria. The village was so remote that people bought petrol in little rum bottles for the scooties and motorcycles that farmers now use. The pump was far away. One of the most sensitive journalists of this […]
Shivanand ji called this morning. Shivanandji has been to jail five times, twice for protesting the use of English in government work. The slogan was: ” Angrezi mein kaam na hoga/Phir se desh goolam na hoga” (Work will not be in English/The country’s enslavement must finish). A recently retired Rajya Sabha MP, Shivanand Tiwari was […]
I stop at Purnea to meet Girindranath Jha, a journalist, who has returned to his ailing father and begun farming. I read his blogs and Facebook posts on harvesting potatoes, the impact of the westerly wind – pachiya – on fruits, the joy of seeing rice saplings sprout, the significance of green fields and running […]
