India

Trafficking is the fastest growing black market trade and it’s all around us

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The Global Slavery Index estimates 45.8 million people globally are in some form of slavery. With 18 million people as slaves, India has the highest absolute numbers. They are found in the sex trade, in mining, as bonded labor, as domestic labor, in manufacturing, in fishing and agriculture. One-fourth of all trafficked people are children. […]

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Women vendors who exist on cash income hit hardest by demonetisation

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Narendra Modi’s decision to strike at black money and corruption by wiping out 86% of the currency notes in circulation has hit women vendors the hardest. These are women who are not part of the banking system, survive on one income (their own), which is entirely in cash earned daily and must negotiate petty bribes

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It’s not just the British, but our govts also owe us a range of apologies

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If we are to talk about apologies with any degree of honesty, then there’s plenty to be remorseful about in post Independent India. It’s not a foreign colonial power, but our own governments that also owe us a range of apologies. Nobody is owed an apology more than the Dalits and the women of this

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The lack of transparency about Jayalalithaa’s health is worrying

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Politicians in India have rarely been forthcoming about their health, taking refuge in the argument that they are entitled to their privacy. Do we as citizens have the right to know? In hindsight, we know that at the time of Independence, Pakistan’s Quaid-e-Azam MA Jinnah had advanced tuberculosis and died just over a year later

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Annihilation of an old order

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Atrocities against Dalits are hardly new, even if the sense of impunity to the gau rakshaks is. Dalits have been denied entry into temples, access to drinking water and beaten for the most minor ‘transgressions’. Beyond the politics lies the far greater moral question of social justice. How does any modern nation tolerate such widespread,

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We no longer hear the voices of our citizens in Kashmir Valley’s narrative

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In the narratives we weave, Kashmiri citizens must be blamed for their own swift repression. In the Kashmiri narrative, the crackdown is yet another instance of the mainland’s immoral suppression of the natural Kashmiri longing for azadi. Neither side is prepared to hear the other. At the time of writing, 37 people are dead in

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Child labour law: We have once again failed our children

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Passed by Parliament, the Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Bill fails our children, again. Ten years ago Mehboob Hossain didn’t know the meaning of the word future. Ten years ago Hossain, now 20, worked in a zari sweatshop in Delhi’s Shahpurjat, embroidering glittery saris. “I know what it’s like,” he says about child labour. “We

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