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this report is very much about the lives of the queer and trans persons whose rights will be debated not just in the Supreme Court, but all around us, in the media, on the streets, in houses and where you have. The voice of the State has already become clear in the invocation of sanskar, sacrament, and such like in the defense of the cis and heterosexual marriage and family. There is a slew of voices all around defending the existing structures of families and opposing the right of not just queer and trans persons, but also inter-religious and inter-caste heterosexual couples to live as they desire.

This moment therefore, is as much about families, and not just about marriage. While the focus is on the demand for marriage equality for queer and trans folx, the legitimacy given to assigned families is as much under question. Chosen families and intimacies cannot be thought of without also looking at the reality of what assigned families do to their queer and trans children.

The families that are supposed to be spaces of nurture, care and support, turn against their own children (often at very young ages), treat them with utter disregard and violence, and force them to conform to socially accepted ideas of what is “normal” without any regard to the individual’s dignity or personhood. Stigma and violence run deep within the space of these families that are assigned to us at birth (or adoption).

https://pucl.org/sites/default/files/reports/Combined_all_2_compressed.pdf

Rights and health - Dr. Ramani Atkuri https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIFn1Qn7x3gMar 27, 2023
Correction at time 20:00 . 67 times should be read as 6.7 times. ie The defence budget in 2023-24 is 5.94 lakh crore rupees. This is 6.7 times the health budget..

The long road to the ‘Right to Health’ in India https://www.southasiamonitor.org/perspective/long-road-right-health-india By Pavitra Mohan and Naina Seth Sep 29, 2022
Clearer commitments and standards on access and quality, making oversight and redressal mechanisms more participatory, and allocating adequate financial resources alone would make the right to healthcare to all citizens a reality.

India tops in internet shutdowns globally for the fifth consecutive year: Report
01 March,2023

With more than 800 million internet users, India has the second-largest digital population in the world, after China. The internet connects the country’s remote rural areas with cities

https://www.newsclick.in/india-tops-internet-shutdown-globally-5th-consecutive-year Out of 187 shutdowns across 35 countries last year, 84 were ordered in India, including 49 in J&K, according to Internet advocacy watchdog Access Now.

Full report https://www.accessnow.org/cms/assets/uploads/2023/02/KeepItOn-2022-Report.pdf

Although Access Now counted fewer than 100 shutdowns in India for the first time since 2017, it is “not convinced” that the government has “embarked on the path towards positive sustained change regarding digital rights”.

“Legal challenges against shutdowns, fewer mass protests in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sustained and increasing crackdown on dissent may have increased administrative friction or reduced the incentives for authorities to impose shutdowns,” the report adds.

The group also feels all disruptions in India in 2022 weren’t recorded due to the government’s “persistent failure to publicly release shutdown orders in violation of the Supreme Court’s judgment” and the “technical challenges in monitoring, tracking, and recording shutdowns—in particular in communities where shutdowns are an emerging issue”.

India’s initiative to study the global benchmarks for water trading indicates that the NITI Aayog, as a national body of planning, has decided to continue with its neoliberalist stand and strengthen it further.

If this comes into effect, though it is a national resource, water will be sold like gold and silver. As NITI Aayog Looks into Water Trading, it Should Know the High Costs it May Bring (thewire.in)

Since the idea is directly concerned with property rights, the foremost challenge is how the legitimisation of monopolisation and exploitation of water and water resources will be justified in prevailing constitutional settings. How will the principles of equality and rights over water as a property be defined for water markets? Once water becomes a commodity for trade, a disturbing question will be what can be a ‘comfortable’ price of water for the poor and middle classes.

For a country like India, this idea also presents a challenge to equity. Instead of fighting for water for all, it encourages more water to the price payers.

As the purpose of trade is to increase private surplus value, the worry is how the government will control the exploitation of groundwater. The NITI Aayog cannot afford to avoid the fact that big farmers and industrialists can collect excess amounts of water by investing in water trading. To ensure more water, they can establish water plants in plain lands and extract groundwater excessively by using advanced technology, as Nestlé is currently doing.

by Deepti Acharya

17/02/2023

The Adani affair: Collapse of regulatory structures People's Commission on Public Sector and Public Service - Statement 10.02.2023
Extracts: SEBI’s own “investigations” into the use of shell companies has been going on for almost two years without any tangible progress. This is indeed serious because it reflects at best either lethargy, carelessness and dereliction of basic regulatory duties, or, at worst, a permissive regulatory regime that encourages cronyism.

Recent media reports reveal that the authorities in Mauritius have been in touch with SEBI, indicating that SEBI may well know or may have already been in the know about the true identities of “beneficial owners” in entities that own shares of the Adani companies.

Answering a Rajya Sabha Question on shell companies on February 6, 2018, the Corporate Affairs Minister stated “The Companies Act, 2013 does not define the term Shell Company. In effect, the Union Government, by conceding that it has no laws to check the abuse of shell companies, has accepted that it has no interest in establishing structures that promote transparency in markets that ensure that the identities of the true beneficial owners of companies are visible to all instead of hiding behind opaque walls.

To make matter worse, the Government’s decision of August 2022, deciding to allow Indian corporate entities to invest in foreign locations, provides ample scope for Indian entities to use shell companies located in tax havens to indulge in round tripping, a mechanism that enables the rerouting of black money into the Indian economy. The decision also permitted domestic entities to make overseas investments, even if they were under investigation by any investigative agency or regulatory authority, a provision that opened the overseas doors for tainted individuals and companies to continue with round tripping. This raises concerns about the motives underlying the decision

The Adani fiasco highlights the futility of the government’s reliance on private global champions to power the Indian economy. Moreover, such a misplaced reliance necessarily rests on a culture of “cronyism”, while holding back the potential of publicly-owned Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSE).

There is widespread apprehension that many corporate entities appear to be operating through a multi-layered and complex web of shell companies set up in tax haven jurisdictions. This has the effect of creating a shadow economy, which enables them to not only evade taxes in India, but to manipulate markets, pass on funds to political parties through opaque vehicles such as Electoral Bonds, and mock at regulatory norms. The power to influence the political executive to adopt policies and laws that promote their own interests, and to the overall detriment of the public interest, is simply unacceptable to a functioning democracy.

Rajni Bakshi writes: The importance of George Soros’s Open Society – for India and the world https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/george-soros-indian-democracy-modi-remarks-open-society-8454825/ Rajni Bakshi February 19, 2023
George Soros’ personal history is itself proof that the most serious contest of our time is not between the 'right' and the 'left' or capitalism and communism. It was between open and closed societies
Soros did not stop at seeing repressive communist regimes as enemies of an open society. By the mid-1990s, Soros began speaking out against what he called “market fundamentalism”. He reformulated his understanding of open society when he realised that excessive individualism and lack of social cohesion are as dangerous as excessive state control. While Popper had limited himself to critiquing communism, Soros used his knowledge as a leading market player to bust myths about the “free market”.

Market fundamentalism, he argued, is a mindset which reduces virtually all human interactions to transactional, contract-based relationships that must be valued in terms of a single common denominator — money.

Many other voices, both in the West and East, helped to puncture “market fundamentalism”. They argued that when free market ideology is treated as an ultimate truth this destroys social good and eventually undermines an open society by insisting that “There Are No Alternatives”, commonly known as the TINA effect.

This is why, in India today, the division between “left” and “right” is unhelpful to grasp what is most urgently at stake.

open society is hanging by a thread. In India, this is a strong thread because, until recently, living with differences came naturally to us. And, however distracted we may be by the controversy of the day, old mental habits cannot evaporate so easily. We know that reality is made up of competing, sometimes contradictory, yet co-existing truths. Open society lives on as long as this is the anchor for a large enough number of people and they dare to speak out.

For full speech of Soros: https://www.georgesoros.com/2023/02/16/remarks-delivered-at-the-2023-munich-security-conference/

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