Women Charge Sheet the Union Govt, RBI, NBFCs and MFIs  https://www.cenfa.org/massive-public-hearing-of-women-charge-sheet-the-union-govt-rbi-nbfcs-and-mfis/  women borrowers of the country face harassment, including sexual harassment, displacement, loss of property, and are sometimes driven to suicide because of the debt traps that are set by these organisations.

Charges against the central government  : Falling expenditure on education, health, and employment generation has forced women to take individual/group loans for their needs.

Even though the number of small women borrowers is increasing, their access to loans from public sector banks is declining because of the policy emphasis on privatisation of the banking sector and promotion of MFIs /NBFCs /SFBs.

Robbing Women to loan to corporates: While small savings account form the bulk of deposits in public sector banks, loans below 2 lakhs has gone below 7%,  whereas loans above 100 crore is 23%.  Scheduled banks lends 187L crore to others, out of which 60% is to NBFCs for onward lending to Women, who pay 22-26% interest, which the FIs get at 9-13 %.

Abetting Suicides Due to Debt Traps
According to NCRB, 671 women committed suicide due to indebtedness in 2022. Every suicide and cause are not reported to NCRB. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjbQeuE3hGk 

Ravikant Kisana's ‘Meet the Savarnas’ is an important contribution to the field of critical caste studies, aiming to reverse the gaze from the marginalised to the privileged castes.

Caste in India is mostly researched and reported from the experience of the oppressed. Caste as a privilege is not understood well. How do caste elites respond to modernity? How do they understand culture, intimacy, love and tradition? Were their ideas, institutions and imaginations ever even capable of delivering upon the Great Indian Dream?

In Meet the Savarnas, Ravikant Kisana goes where few authors have dared: to document the lives, the concerns and crises of India’s urban elites, to frame the savarnas as a distinct social cohort, one that operates within itself and yet is oblivious of its own social rules, privileges and systems.

Unpacking Privilege: The Other Side of Caste - The Wire 

by Ravi Bharmouri

20/08/2025

Gadchiroli, the 'Favourite District' of Devendra Fadnavis, Sees Decline in Maoism, Increase in Mining https://thewire.in/politics/gadchiroli-the-favourite-district-of-devendra-fadnavis-sees-decline-in-maoism-increase-in-mining by Santoshi Markam

Vinod Mandavi, an activist with the Adivasi Vikas Parishad of Potegaon, accused the Gadchiroli collector of fabricating gram sabha documents in 2010, to falsely demonstrate public consent for mining. Allegations suggest that such counterfeit gram sabha documents were produced with the assistance of village gram sevaks in Damakondawahi, located in the Bande area of the ​​Etapalli block.

In 2023, the police forcefully shut down the peaceful dharna organized by tribal members from over 70 villages, which had persisted for about eight months in opposition to the Surjagarh mining. The protest against the mine in Todgatta lasted for 255 days in 2023,  People were forcibly removed from the area, huts were vandalised, and 21 individuals – including women – were detained. They faced false charges and were held in Chandrapur jail for 17-18 days before being released on bail. 

Retotalising Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction to its History https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/retotalising-capitalism-a-very-short-introduction-to-its-history/ Jairus Banaji  In my Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, I argued that, in retrospect, Marx turns out to have been wrong to think of Britain as the incarnation of industrial capital that subordinated commercial capital, since the latter was entrenched at the heart of the British economy (as Geoffrey Ingham argued in the eighties) and a much better incarnation would soon emerge with the Second Industrial Revolution when modern vertically integrated firms would undercut the position of merchant firms in both the U.S. and Germany.

Chayanov’s idea of the vertical concentration of capital as the form in which capitalist firms tended to establish a more widespread domination over household producers in the countryside.

Rural exodus has been a major theme of the postwar decades...in China, whole villages are demolished and peasants expected to cope with the resulting loss of land by buying unaffordable social insurance.   In India, the state would like to be able to have comparable powers of coercion, but the caste ties of most farming communities gives them considerable leverage politically and makes widespread coercion impossible. What we are witnessing is the end of the peasantry in any viable sense of that term, but not in the straightforward ways that were once seen as key drivers of this process in many predictions on the Left.

https://files.libcom.org/files/brenner.pdf peasantry’s failure : landlords  create large farms and to lease them to capitalist tenants who could afford to make capitalist investments’ and cultivate them with wage-labour

Only one per cent households control around 60% of the total wealth in India, indicating to the highlt concentrated nature of household wealth in the country. 1% Controls 60% of Total Wealth in India, Rich to Get Richer: Report - The Wire

According to a recent report by brokerage firm Bernstein, the super rich in India, estimated to be around three million households hold $2.7 trillion in liquid financial wealth, reported Business Standard.

“Although growth will continue to create opportunities across the pyramid, we think the rich will get richer. India’s uber-rich – an estimated nearly three million households – hold $2.7 trillion in liquid financial wealth, by our estimates,” observed Bernstein, reported Mint.

This rise of the uber-rich is also expected to increase the demand for professional wealth managers.

04/08/2025

ICJ delivers an unambiguous order on states’ responsibilities to halt climate change https://scroll.in/article/1084853/icj-delivers-an-unambiguous-order-on-states-responsibilities-to-halt-climate-change  Meena Menon  The United Nations’ judicial organ paved the way for states to be held accountable for fossil fuel emissions and the resultant climate harm. failure of states to take measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by continuing fossil fuel production, granting exploration licences or fossil fuel subsidies constituted an internationally wrongful act. States also have an obligation to regulate private actors as a matter of due diligence. in the event that restitution should prove to be materially impossible, responsible states have an obligation to compensate.  

the court held that it was scientifically possible to determine the emissions contribution of each state in both current and historical terms.... states were obliged to adhere to both customary and international laws as well the climate treaties: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement and other United Nations conventions on biodiversity, desertification as well as human rights and the Law of the Sea.

On November 26, 1947, a little over three months after India’s independence, Mahatma Gandhi presciently cautioned that use of media by a ruling party for its own propaganda and image building would usher in dictatorship. He said this while dealing with a complaint that the Congress party was employing radio for broadcasting information about itself and its activities. “If the Congress uses the radio, etc., like this for its own propaganda, it is bound to bring about dictatorship in the end,” he warned.

https://thewire.in/media/press-freedom-under-modi-worse-than-during-emergency 

During the 11 years of Modi’s regime, there has been no official proclamation of emergency, yet the status of media is worse than during the Emergency period of 1975-77. The essence of Mahatma Gandhi’s warning – that if the ruling party used media for propaganda it would lead to dictatorship – is being played out more viciously during Modi’s tenure, with adverse consequences for democracy and the Constitution.

In the press freedom index, India occupies the 151st position among 180 countries. This low ranking has been accompanied by coercive measures against journalists, many arrested using draconian laws. A news platform like NewsClick has faced raids by agencies including the police and the enforcement directorate.

by S N Sahu

26/06/2025

In recent years, the election process in India has been converted into one party’s fiefdom. Two sets of methods have been weaponised to subvert the verdict of the people, which are adopted at each stage of the electoral voting system. They are used before voting day, or on the voting day, and after the voting day.

https://thewire.in/government/election-malpractices-india-voter-rolls-evm 

Names from voter lists were allegedly deleted ahead of the Delhi elections, as well as Maharashtra state elections. Both occurred in quick succession after the Lok Sabha polls. This is an age-old method which has now been taken to new heights.

The root cause behind the voter registration manipulation is Rule 18 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, which allows for deletion of voter data without notice or an opportunity to be heard by the affected citizen. At the EC’s assurance, the Supreme Court also disposed of a PIL which challenged the constitutional validity of Rule 18.

to insert travelling voters of one party from other states (with duplicate identity cards) to polling booths in a state where elections are taking place, by duplicating Electronic Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers across states. This method was used, allegedly in Maharashtra and Delhi, to general acceptance. I

there is always the possibility of toppling the government already formed by buying out the MLA or MP.

Over the period 2015 to 2024 as many as 10 state governments led by opposition parties were toppled by the ruling party government at the Union. This is done by simply buying the MLAs of the state ruling party, with the goal of making them support the party with the largest financial ability to buy MLAs. The defence of the ruling party is that this method has historically been adopted for a long time.

by Santosh Mehrotra and Jagdeep Chhokar

09/06/2025

Social platforms have transformed how we communicate, often encouraging users to share without reflection. Rather than appealing to our reasoning faculties, these systems exploit cognitive biases, fostering addictive behaviours that erode our capacity for focused thought. This manipulation of attention has far-reaching implications, not only for individual cognition but also for collective autonomy.

https://theleaflet.in/digital-rights/in-the-age-of-algorithm-we-must-revitalise-the-conversation-on-the-freedom-of-thought 

Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court once noted, “Minds are not changed in streets and parks as they once were. To an increasing degree, the more significant interchanges of ideas and shaping of public consciousness occur in mass and electronic media”. This observation underscores a shift from traditional public discourse to algorithmically mediated interaction, where information flows are technology driven.

A darker potential looms in the prospect of technologies capable of influencing, interpreting, or even controlling thought itself—akin to the phenomenon of “Doublethink”, to borrow from  Orwell’s ‘1984’, where individuals were compelled to abandon personal perception in favour of officially sanctioned narratives. In such a world, privacy of thought vanishes, replaced by surveillance so pervasive that even dreams or diary entries could incriminate.

The United Nations raised red flags in 2021 about the ethical risks of emerging neurotechnologies designed to decode, predict, or alter human thought. Companies like Meta and Neuralink are racing to develop brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can convert neural activity into digital output in real-time. 

These systems could allow users to control devices with their thoughts but they also risk breaching the last bastion of human freedom: the mind itself. 

Despite its critical importance, the right to freedom of thought (‘FoT’) remains underdeveloped in both law and discourse.

Importantly, safeguarding FoT is not just the duty of governments. Citizens, too, must recognise its value. Thinking critically is neither easy nor always comfortable. It requires effort, courage, and openness to uncertainty. 

As noted, “Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us.” But the cost of neglecting this right may be far greater. If freedom of thought is eroded by invasive technologies, coercive platforms, or passive disinterest we risk losing not only our dignity and democracy, but our humanity itself. As we navigate the complexities of the digital age, we must ensure that the last refuge of freedom “the human mind” remains protected from prying eyes and manipulative hands.

by Mahima Garg

02/06/2025