Posts Tagged ‘India’
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
13/10/09
It’s already started. When I call Bangalore, my Amamma answers the phone speaking in a language I don’t understand. I scream my name intermittently, hoping that the words will get through from Melbourne to India, but nothing does. Perhaps she’s forgotten she has a granddaughter in Australia. It doesn’t help that she’s deaf in her left ear – the one she leans the receiver on – but at 88 she is excused just about anything. I manage to understand from her shrieks that preparations for Diwali, ”the festival of lights”, have begun. My aunt is at the temple making a puja (prayer) for the Goddess Lakshmi and taking prasad (sweets) to the neighbour’s house. She will clean the house, light oil lamps and create Rangoli designs on the dirt path outside the front door with flour, rice and coloured chalk to attract the goddess. Wealth and good fortune are Lakshmi’s business and on Diwali she’s as stretched as Father Christmas. My aunt is not alone. For the five days leading up to October 17 through to the day itself, Indians of all denominations around the world cleanse themselves and their houses, light lamps and set off firecrackers for the goddess.
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Tags: Australia, India
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Monday, October 5th, 2009
5/10/09
Findings by Save The Children in India highlight the seriousness of the crisis. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could find the spotlight fixed firmly on him should he take the findings by Save The Children in India seriously. The findings by this body highlight the startling details of India’s mortality crisis and the scant effort that is being made to contain it. The schemes are in place and so is the allocation of resources, but the results are lacking simply because the programme is not reaching out to the people. India’s child mortality rate surpasses that of Bangladesh and when viewed in a global perspective the percentages are equally astounding with 72 deaths per every 1,000 births. And more than two million Indian children die each year before their fifth birthday.
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Tags: Children, Human Rights, India
Posted in Health & Children, Human Rights, India | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
Matt Wade; 30/9/09
The United Nations is set to declare the centuries-old Hindu caste system a human rights violation. The UN’s Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva, is expected to ratify draft principles that recognise caste-based discrimination as an abuse of human rights. The draft undertakes to work for the ”effective elimination of discrimination based on work and descent”. Non-government human rights organisations estimate 260 million people globally are victims of caste discrimination, mostly on the Indian subcontinent. India resists the ”internationalisation” of the caste issue and is understood to have lobbied hard to remove the word caste from a draft.
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Tags: Human Rights, India, UN
Posted in Human Rights, India, Racism, United Nations | No Comments »
Saturday, September 19th, 2009
Jim Yardley; 19/9/09
As the morning commuter train rattled down the track, Chinu Sharma, an office worker, enjoyed the absence of men. Some of them pinch and grope women on trains, or shout insults and catcalls, she said. Her friend Vandana Rohile agreed and widened her eyes in mock imitation. ”Sometimes they just stare at you,” said Ms Rohile, 27. Up and down the jostling train, women repeated the same theme. As millions of women have poured into the Indian workforce over the past decade, they have met different obstacles in a tradition-bound, patriarchal culture, but few are more annoying than the basic task of getting to work. The problems of taunting and harassment, known as Eve Teasing, are so persistent that in recent months the Government has decided to simply remove men altogether.
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Tags: Gender, India, Womens Rights
Posted in Gender & Marriage, India, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Friday, September 18th, 2009
Jeremy Page; 18/9/09
India is condemning another generation to brain damage, poor education and early death by failing to meet its targets for tackling the malnutrition that affects almost half of its children, a study has found. The country is an “economic powerhouse but a nutritional weakling”, said the report by the Britain-based Institute of Development Studies, which incorporated papers by more than 20 India analysts. The report, released yesterday, says that despite India’s recent economic boom, at least 46 per cent of children up to the age of three still suffer from malnutrition, making the country home to one-third of the world’s malnourished children. The UN defines malnutrition as a state in which an individual can no longer maintain natural bodily capacities such as growth, pregnancy, lactation, learning abilities, physical work and resisting and recovering from disease.
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Tags: health, India, Trade, UN
Posted in Aid / Trade, Health & Children, Human Rights, India, United Nations | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
Dean Nelson; 16/5/09
Farmers in India made destitute by droughts blamed on climate change are selling their wives to brothels to pay off moneylenders. A succession of droughts compounded by flash floods in recent years have destroyed crops and ruined the soil, leaving farmers in debt to loan sharks. The growing number of farmers who have committed suicide to escape the shame has attracted concern but less attention has been paid to farmers handing their wives and daughters over to prostitution.
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Tags: India, Sex Trade
Posted in Aid / Trade, Health & Children, Human Rights, India, Sex Trade, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
Andrew Wander; 9/9/09
For the women who live there, the daily challenge of scratching a living from the scorched land means that education has become a luxury rather than a right. Life in Bundelkhand, a desperately poor district of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, is hard at the best of times. In a land ravaged by drought for the past decade, farmers can only look on as their crops fail, their cattle die and their incomes wither under the searing Indian sunYet among Bundelkhand’s barren fields, a pioneering literacy project is flourishing in some of the district’s poorest communities.
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Tags: Global, India, Womens Rights
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Saturday, August 8th, 2009
Arundhati Roy speaks to Tim Adams; 8/8/09;
“Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy” is out next month.
Arundhati Roy has two voices. The first, dramatically personal and playful, was the one in which she wrote her extraordinary debut novel, The God of Small Things, a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in rural Kerala. The second voice is flatter and angrier, more urban and distrustful of the quirks of the individual. She describes it as “writing from the heart of the crowd”. It is this voice that she has used exclusively in the 12 years since her novel was published, in four collections of non-fiction – the latest of which is “Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy”. Roy, now 47, describes the difference between the two voices as the difference between “dancing and walking”. It is a long while since Roy’s writing has danced.
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Tags: Human Rights, India
Posted in Human Rights, India | No Comments »
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
30/7/09; http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/30/2641545.htm?section=justin
A rural Indian witchdoctor beheaded a five-year-old girl as part of a bizarre ritual to help a villager produce healthy male heirs, police have said. Vandana Kumari was murdered on Tuesday (local time) in Lakhimpur Kheri district, 200 kilometres from the Uttar Pradesh state capital Lucknow, police officer Ravi Srivastava said Thursday. Occult practitioner Mewalal Chauhan recommended the “human sacrifice” when the child’s neighbour Ram Niwas came to him for help, Mr Srivastava said. “Ram Niwas had sons but none of them survived infancy. His brother too was ailing. The ‘tantrik’ Chauhan said a human sacrifice was necessary to get rid of these problems,” he said. The witchdoctor, his male assistant and Niwas lured the little girl into a field where Chauhan cut off her head after prayers and rituals, the police officer said. Police said they recovered the child’s headless body after her mother reported her missing, and had detained the three men. Belief in black magic is common among superstitious rural Indians. Many families in India value male heirs for their breadwinning potential, and sons are needed to light their parents’ funeral pyres under Hindu rites.
Religion, India, Human Rights
Tags: Human Rights, India, Religion
Posted in Health & Children, Human Rights, India, Religion | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Tulsi Bisht; 28/7/09
Tulsi C. Bisht is a freelance researcher and writer with a PhD in Anthropology from the La Trobe University. He has worked with voluntary organisations, Government of India and the United Nations Mission in Haiti. Tulsi is currently developing a research project on issues of climate change and human security in South Asia region.
The attacks on Indian students have had two intriguing outcomes. First, the Indian community in Australia, which includes the established community and the more recently arrived students, seems to be divided. Second, the Indian media is relentlessly portraying Australia as a racist country, and Australia is having to try to clear itself of a racist image. Both of these outcomes bear deeper probing. Australia’s Indian-born population has grown sizably over the past few decades. There is a well-established Indian community in most Australian cities. In the past few years there has been a rapid increase in the Indian student population as well: an estimated 90,000 Indian students are currently in Australia. For a long time the Indian community mixed easily with the wider Australian community. But with the large-scale arrival of Indian students, the Indian community has emerged as a visible ethnic ‘other’.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, India
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Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
Paul Maley & Stephen Fitzpatrick; 14/7/09
The Afghan asylum-seekers whose boat foundered in eastern Indonesia last week were told by people-smugglers they would be travelling to Australia on a “big ship” with their passports. In a revealing insight into the way smugglers do business, Hussain Ali, 24, told The Australian the Afghan who organised his passage to Australia disappeared as he and his fellow Hazaras were due to board the ill-fated vessel. The news came as investigators in Indonesia said the bulk of the up to 85 Afghan asylum-seekers aboard the boat had probably filtered back to Jakarta, where it is feared they will try to launch a second attempt to reach Australia. Mr Ali said yesterday he had paid $US8000 ($10,300) for his trip to Australia, which began with a meeting with an “agent”, or people-smuggler, in Kabul more than two months ago.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, India, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees, Workers
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, India, Indonesia, Refugee & Migrant, Workers | 1 Comment »
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
Matt Wade; 3/6/09
Laws dating back to the British Raj that banned gay sex have been overturned in a landmark judgment in India’s capital. The 150-year-old section 377 of India’s penal code, introduced when the British ruled the subcontinent, described homosexual intercourse as “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” and imposed a 10-year jail term for offenders. The Delhi High Court yesterday declared the laws a violation of “fundamental rights” and unconstitutional. The decision means consensual sex between those over the age of 18 will no longer be punishable, although the court ruled that section 377 should still apply to cases of non-consensual sex and pedophilia.
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Tags: Eunuchs, Homosexuality, India
Posted in Homosexuality, Human Rights, India | No Comments »
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
Amanda Hodge; 27/6/09; (2 Items)
In a stifling room adorned with rainbow curtains and glamour posters, Mani – a high school student from Delhi’s outer suburbs – submits to painful eyebrow threading with all the poise of a seasoned groomer. A regular at the Pahal Beauty Parlour – India’s first gay beauty clinic cum drop-in centre – the 19-year-old says he will be marching this Sunday in Delhi’s Gay Pride parade. But like many others he will do so behind a mask, notwithstanding the day’s preening efforts. While Mani identifies himself as a Kothi – or effeminate gay man – he says his parents don’t know he is gay and would probably throw him out if he told them. They think his waxing is all part of his passion for religious dancing, chuckles Rahul Singh, a gay counsellor at the parlour and co-founder of the Pahal Foundation behind the venture. Not so amusing is Mani’s fate as a lower caste gay Indian man. Asked about marriage, he says he will soon submit to family pressure and live a double life.
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Tags: Australia, Homosexuality, Human Rights, India
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Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
Cara Munro; 3/6/09
Cara Munro is a registered nurse. Her essay Noor placed Third in the 2008 Margaret Dooley Awards.
At Rawalpindi bus terminal, the light is violet from the rising moon, and gray from the perpetual smog. I am held in the mystery and danger of twilight in a new city. Fresh off the long haul bus, I weave my way through loading an unloading vehicles towards the indigo glow of gas burners and promising smells of an outdoor café. There is no menu, just tall pots of rich burgundy curry and people sitting at tables solemnly picking apart joints of meat atop flat plates of rice. Tired bus drivers, rickshaw wallas, families consisting entirely of men. I am vegetarian, I am tired and I am hungry. I am also a stranger, a foreign woman alone in a creased salwar kames and slippery head scarf that constantly fails to sit quite right. I bite my lip and contemplate the Urdu required to order a meal of something less meaty than what I can see the other diners eating.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, India, Racism
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Monday, June 1st, 2009
Nilofar Suhrawardy; 1//609
The only representative in the Union Cabinet from the eastern state of Bihar, Meira Kumar, is the Congress party’s pick for becoming the first woman speaker of the Parliament, sources said.Water Resources Minister Meira, who is daughter of late former Deputy Prime Minister and veteran Dalit leader Jagjivan Ram. A five-time member of Parliament, Meira won from Sasaram in Bihar, while she had been elected earlier from Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. She quit the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) which took her to embassies in Spain, Britain and Mauritius, to take to politics in 1985. A law graduate, Meira Kumar also holds a masters degree in English literature.
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Tags: India, Womens Rights
Posted in Human Rights, India, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
Nilofar Suhrawardy; 28/4/09
India’s Supreme Court yesterday asked a special probe panel formed by it to look into the allegations that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi along with over 50 other politicians and government officials had aided and abetted statewide communal riots in 2002. A bench of Justices Arijit Pasayat and Asok Kumar Ganguly directed the panel headed by Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) former Director R.K. Raghavan to particularly look into the allegations that Modi was involved in the killing of an MP in Ahmedabad’s Gulbarga Society arson case. The panel was asked to file its report within three months.
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Tags: Gujurat, India
Posted in Christianity, Human Rights, India, Religion, Terrorism | No Comments »
