How Indian schools’ focus on entrance tests is stunting education
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In-depth reporting on the stories that bind us.
This yield from Jharkhand’s trees might hold the key to rural livelihoods
Hello,Every one of us has likely encountered lac in some form or the other. The substance is used in the manufacture of a vast range of products, from cosmetics and jewellery to insulation coating for electrical equipment. It is even used to add polish to products such as fruits and candies.But few of us, perhaps, have thought about where lac comes from. Lac is, in fact, a substance secreted by the Kerria lacca insect, which affixes itself to the branches of host trees like ber and kusum. And, as Nolina Minj found, reporting from Jharkhand, to many in rural India, lac cultivation offers a pathway to a livelihood that is more secure than that of agriculture, and other work."Today our country is the leading producer of quality lac in the world, and over 55% of this production is carried out by small scale Adivasi farmers in Jharkhand," Minj said. "We thus have a sort of monopoly over this natural polymer that's high in demand worldwide."But as experts and cultivators explained, lac production has seen a turbulent history, with output dipping for various reasons at different times, from unscientific cultivation to climate change. Securing the produce against these factors, they noted, would be key to providing cultivators with stable livelihoods."People say there aren't many livelihood options in rural Jharkhand besides agriculture and extractive mining," Minj said. "But then there's lac cultivation – an ecologically sustainable livelihood option if done right, which also holds much economic promise."
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Why Adivasi women are fighting for their rights to ancestral lands
Hello,Among Adivasi communities, land is not seen only as property, especially not as individual property. It is considered a vital part of culture, and under Indian law, the communities' use of land is governed by customary law.In this context, many object to the efforts by some Adivasi women to secure their rights over ancestral lands. They argue that such efforts are in conflict with traditional culture, and that the women should not be granted the rights they seek.But as Nolina Minj found, women note that families often use the idea of customary law to evict women from family lands, and deny them basic resources for their sustenance. Further, they argue that many men have acquired individual rights over land, and that to deny women this security would be a grave injustice."Several Adivasi communities have been steadily losing land to the government, corporations and other private players," Minj said. "There exist genuine anxieties about land loss and the consequent erosion of Adivasi socio-cultural identity."She added, "However, treating Adivasi women’s demand for inheritance as just an avenue for further land grab by outsiders overlooks the immense suffering and dispossession that they are enduring on the ground."
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Why young Indians are not interested in the prime minister’s ambitious internship scheme
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Meet the Indian ‘tradwives’ who are clocking millions of views online
Hello,If you are a frequent user of Instagram, there is a good chance that over the past year or so, you have encountered videos by Indian content creators with titles such as “A day in the life of a 21-year-old married woman”.And if you glanced at the views counter, you might have found that the videos had been watched tens or hundreds of thousands of times, or in some cases more than a million times.These videos are in some ways a parallel phenomenon to the trend of “tradwife” videos in the West, by women who glorify marital domesticity, focusing on cooking, homemaking and being good wives. But as experts told Divya Aslesha and Nolina Minj, in the West, this trend represents an embrace of traditional lifestyles, and a rejection of pressures to work and earn a living. In India, however, these content creators are in essence promoting conservative values and lifestyles that are already the norm.“Two of the creators we spoke to used to post content before they were married, but it was only after they started sharing wedding and marriage related content that their followers shot up drastically,” Minj said. “It indicates that the audience and the algorithm likes such content despite their polarised feelings toward the actual content.” She added, “Some of the creators said that hateful comments actually help their engagement. Despite the hate, the creators have learnt to prioritise traction above everything else.”Aslesha noted that while these women were often criticised, “they are also showing us, however inadvertently, the immense contradictions of modern womanhood”. She added, “Social media content is often dismissed as something insignificant, superficial or unworthy of any deeper questions, but this trend says something important about ideas of gender, domesticity, and even how feminist politics and ideas are perceived in Indian society.”You can read the story here.
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How separate lifts in Mumbai highrises sustain caste prejudice in the city
Hello,As Mumbai goes through a redevelopment boom, an egregious practice is becoming commonplace. That is: the barring of domestic workers and delivery persons from residential lifts in apartments, and segregating them into service lifts, or even forcing them to use stairs and roundabout pathways.While building societies offer various justifications for such rules, activists and experts note that they essentially constitute modern forms of casteism. Nolina Minj reported from Mumbai on how these practices lead to distress and inconvenience for workers, who lose immense time and energy as a result. Their protestations and arguments that they are being denied basic rights have thus far largely been ignored.“Dealing with pressing issues like low wages and job insecurity, at first workers didn’t consider separate elevators as a major issue,” Minj said. “However, as they began opening up about their experiences with elevators, the conversations soon revealed how their imposed use felt discriminatory and robbed them of their dignity as human beings.”She added, “I had assumed that within highrise buildings all elevators would be the same, but learning of how service elevators could be made of different materials was quite revealing of the caste-class dynamics in such building societies.”You can read the story here.
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Swept away by glacial flood, Sikkim dam is being rebuilt – but lives downstream remain shattered
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Why workers who grow one of the world’s finest teas face an uncertain future
Hello,Darjeeling tea is perhaps India’s most famous tea, and indeed, one of the world’s most famous teas. Since tea bushes began to be planted in the district in the mid-1800s by British colonisers, the industry has grown to become the region’s economic backbone.But in recent years, it has come under immense strain from a combination of factors, including climate change, competition and sociopolitical strife. Among the government initiatives to help estates survive is a policy that allows them to use a proportion of tea estate land for other purposes.Amidst this turmoil, it is the workers who cultivate the plants who are hardest hit, as Nolina Minj found. Many receive pay that is below minimum wage, often months delayed, and have no rights over their homes on estate lands.“As tea estate owners and workers explained, Darjeeling tea is considered a national pride, often gifted to foreign dignitaries by Indian political leaders,” Minj said. “The crisis in the Darjeeling tea industry is deeply entwined with the tea estate workers’ crisis. Darjeeling tea is produced because of them and the future seems bleak if both the tea industry and the workers’ conditions are not improved.”You can read the story here.
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Why Indian cities flood within hours of rain
Hello,Residents of Indian cities now more or less expect that they will flood within hours of monsoon rains every year. Many believe that the cities are simply not designed to handle the level of rain they receive.But in fact, some are equipped with fairly robust stormwater drain systems, as Vaishnavi Rathore found, looking at the example of Delhi. It was, primarily, poor management of this system and unregulated construction over it that left the drains clogged and useless in many parts of the city. In Delhi, the failure to resolve this problem was particularly stark given that some years ago, the government commissioned a study on it by IIT Delhi, only to shelve its analysis and recommendations.
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Marang Buru vs Parasnath: The conflict over Jharkhand’s highest peak
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The deadliest wildlife conflict in India is being treated as a medical problem
Hello,It is unlikely that you have very recently given much thought to snakes, or the risk of snakebites. It is a danger that few among the relatively well-heeled in Indian society ever encounter.
How Adivasis are fighting to protect their sacred groves from destruction
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Why India has the worst amputation epidemic in the world
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The unlikely success of a novel justice delivery system in Bihar
Hello,The Indian judicial system is notorious for its backlogs. According to the National Judicial Data Grid, more than 72% of cases in the country’s district courts and more than 79% in the high courts are more than a year old.Given this, an experiment in Bihar in delivering grassroots justice has seen remarkable results.The state has since 2006 set up a system of village courts, which deal with matters such as land disputes and family feuds. And though the system still faces some lingering problems, such as the influence of class and caste dynamics, data on their disposal is impressive: one 2022 study of 15 such courts found that 80% of the cases filed before them were disposed of within six weeks.Anuradha Nagaraj reports on the gram kachcheris of Bihar, and on how the state overcame legal hurdles to establish the system over several decades.
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Why drones are surveying Indian villages
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How Kerala’s trade unions have failed women
Hello,Among the things Kerala is best known for is its rich history of left movements and organisations. The state’s socialist moorings are often credited as one reason for its relatively impressive performance in fields such as health and education.But what is less known about these movements and groups, trade unions prominent among them, is the ways in which they have been exclusionary. Women, for instance, have struggled for decades to be heard and represented in them, as Johanna Deeksha found, reporting from Kerala.Denied a voice and platform, some women took matters into their own hands and launched their own movements and organisations, fighting for rights as basic as to sit while working in shops, and to use toilets in the establishments. Their battles have been far from easy, but over the years, they have notched up several small victories.“Women are failed by so many institutions, but it was especially disappointing to see that trade unions have failed them too, despite espousing values of equality,” Deeksha said. “Even in these spaces, women have to fight to be heard, for their problems to be considered and addressed.”
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The murky, unregulated world of psychological counselling in India
Hello,In many ways, the passage of the Mental Healthcare Act of 2017 was a positive development. The law was aimed at regulating mental healthcare services in the country and contained several provisions to safeguard the rights of those who sought support and treatment.But when it came to the field of counselling, the law contained a flaw – it only acknowledged clinical psychologists, who work in clinical settings, and not others, usually referred to as counselling psychologists. This contributed to a longstanding lack of clarity among the wider public about the qualifications that psychologists should possess.In effect, this lack of clarity has allowed a range of unqualified and poorly trained individuals from offering counselling services. These include a rapidly increasing number of “mental health influencers”, whose tendency to offer quick-fix diagnoses and solutions on social media has left many professionals in the field uneasy.“While reporting this story I was amazed to learn about the range of strange experiences people have had in the name of counselling,” said Nolina Minj, who spoke to qualified psychologists, as well as those who have received counselling from individuals with questionable credentials. “The lack of regulation and information about requisite training for counsellors, amongst the general population, is dangerous.”She added, “If India is to take mental healthcare seriously, then it urgently needs to consolidate regulation, certification and operational protocol for all psychologists.”
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For Jharkhand’s Asurs, the present matters more than a mythic past
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On the Great Nicobar island, why the future is fearful
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Why India needs to rethink its love for pigeons
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