Hello,

When people think of disabilities, they usually imagine clearly discernible conditions. But disabilities also include some conditions that are not immediately apparent, and in fact can also be significantly difficult to diagnose.

Among these are blood disorders such as sickle cell anemia and thalassemia, which are classified as haemoglobinopathies. These conditions seriously impair the quality of life of those who live with them: daily tasks often become immensely painful, and activities such as studying and working often become unmanageable.

And as Nolina Minj found after meeting several patients and their families in Jharkhand's East and West Singhbhum districts, the suffering of those with these conditions is often intensified because many regions lack the proper infrastructure to diagnose and treat them. Furthermore, proper care and treatment is expensive.

"India has some of the largest numbers of persons having thalassemia and sickle cell anemia. My reporting showed that a person's chances of getting diagnosed and receiving treatment for these illnesses is highly contingent upon their socioeconomic status. These chance are worse off if they live in rural and tribal areas," said Minj.

You can read the story here.

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Ajay Krishnan
Senior Editor

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Why many villages oppose a programme that rewards companies that plant trees

Hello,On paper, the idea of the green credits programme sounds reasonable. Companies can pay the government to afforest “degraded” forest land, and earn green credits for doing so. They can then use these credits later to fulfill their own compensatory afforestation obligations when they use forest land for particular projects.But experts, and those who live in villages near these green credits sites, say that the programme is deeply flawed. Chief among the flaws is that many sites include lands that the villages have been using for years – when they are fenced off for the programme, locals lose access to them. Further, experts say, the focus on so-called degraded forests carries a risk of massively undervaluing the ecological importance of these sites."We had been tracking this policy since 2023, when it was first announced," said Vaishnavi Rathore, who visited Gujarat's Vyara tehsil to report on the programme.She noted with concern that affected villages in the area were not adequately consulted before the programme was rolled out. "Over three years, we followed the programme from paperwork to communities on the ground – which to me was the most crucial piece of the puzzle," she said. "It was disappointing to see that many people who knew the forests intimately, the species and their uses, did not even realise when and why these forests were taken away from them."You can read the story here.

Why public spaces in India are a minefield for children with intellectual disabilities

Hello,Most of us hardly think twice about the process of taking a journey on a bus, or train or plane. We are familiar with the steps involved and usually navigate them without too much difficulty.To a young person with an intellectual disability, however, these experiences, and others in public spaces, are often confusing and frightening. The sensory stimuli they encounter can overwhelm them, causing them to react in panic.As their families often find, the challenge of keeping the children calm is frequently exacerbated by the fact that public spaces are rarely designed with any thought to the needs of those with these disabilities. Further, many people they encounter in the course of moving through public spaces treat the children with outright hostility."The public has made things harder for them because of which they are confined to their own homes," said Johanna Deeksha, who spoke to parents in several cities who have children with intellectual disabilities. "Nobody was concerned enough to address their children's needs which were not that many – quiet spaces, safer equipment."She added, "If authorities were to make spaces inclusive, I think it would benefit everybody. We cannot abandon parents with children with special needs. We need to see them and hear them."You can read her story here.

Why domestic gig workers in India are unhappy despite the better pay

Hello,If you live in a major Indian city, there is a good chance that you have heard of Pronto and Snabbit.The two apps, as well as Urban Company's Insta Help vertical, allow users to book the services of domestic workers as and when they need them, for the time they need, to carry out specific tasks. The apps have allowed users to be less dependent on regularly employed workers, who one app's founder argued, were unreliable.Many workers have shifted to the new platforms, finding that their earnings were significantly higher through them. But as Nolina Minj found, speaking to around 35 workers in Mumbai, they also faced old and new challenges on these apps. Among these was a lack of transparency over how their earnings were determined by the apps' algorithms. They also said they were often forced to overwork, and unable to take time off to recover from illnesses, or to care for their families. "In initial conversations, workers usually spoke about how there were no other avenues for work that would pay them as much," Minj said. "Unfortunately, researchers have observed that this is how platform companies operate. They have low prices for customers and high wages for workers initially, but as soon as the market stabilises, the workers' incomes drop."She added, "All of these apps have branded themselves as empowering women workers through algorithm-driven gig work. But interviews revealed that the entanglements of class, caste and religion persist in exploitative ways."You can read the story here.

What keeps witch-hunting alive in Jharkhand

Hello,In 2023, Jharkhand saw 22 murders of people who had been killed on suspicions that they were practicing witchcraft. This was higher than the number of such killings in any other state, and twice the number the state had seen the previous year.Nolina Minj travelled to villages such as Durutoli and Bahvaar Toli, which had seen instances of such attacks in recent times, to understand the extent of the problem. She found that on the ground, most villagers professed a firm belief in the idea that some women practised witchcraft and sought to bring harm to people around them. Meanwhile, families of women who had been attacked, and killed, were left grappling with tragedy, with little support from the government or local communities. Though the state government launched a project in 2020 to tackle the problem, there is little record of what it has accomplished.Worryingly, activists noted that the problem was likely even more serious than the official numbers suggested. “Often, when women are killed deep in rural areas, communities keep quiet and word about the crime doesn’t reach the police,” said Hiramani Deogam, an anti-witch-hunting activist from Chaibasa.You can read the story here.

Why Jharkhand’s vulnerable tribal groups think Modi government is building marriage halls for them

Hello,Two years ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a sweeping scheme that aimed to uplift some of the country's poorest communities. These were the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, many of whom live without basic health and education services, and even necessities such as water and electricity.Modi announced the scheme, named PM-JANMAN, in Jharkhand, a state in which around 4 lakh people belong to these groups. It had a budget of more than Rs 24,000 crore, to be spent towards safe housing, clean drinking water, education, health, telecom connectivity and livelihood opportunities.But when Nolina Minj visited four remote villages in Jharkhand where the scheme was supposedly implemented, she found that work under it had barely made any difference on the ground. In fact, many locals she spoke to had not even heard of it."While I wasn’t expecting top class infrastructure, I presumed that conditions would have at least slightly improved due to the PM JANMAN scheme and other previous interventions," Minj said. "I was in for disappointment." She was particularly struck by how little difference multi-purpose centres that had been constructed under the scheme had made. "The MPC structure at Salgi village was most preposterous as families there still don’t have access to basic facilities like potable water and electricity," she said. "Even in places like Range Tusrukona where the MPC had been running for a while, newborn babies are still dying due to lack of access to proper healthcare."

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."

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."

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.

Why disability support still evades those with blood disorders

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