Reportage on a planet without equitable or sustainable development.
Making The Indian Government More Accountable
december has been a slow month. i kept falling ill. anyway, here is a small (and guardedly optimistic) story on how to make the indian state more accountable.
…a clutch of new laws, like the Right To Information Act (RTI) and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), are moving the government’s developmental promises beyond “the realm of a privilege that benevolent regimes might provide to their citizens to a right that could be ‘legally enforced’, claimed and asserted,” to quote feminist scholar Srilatha Batliwala…
…The question is: Have these Bills begun to change the relationship between the state and the people? Are we, as MKSS activist Nikhil Dey puts it, moving from being subjects to citizens?
ps – falling ill is not as bad a deal as it sounds. i finished reading some good books. including, drumroll, raag darbari. which i had picked up during the rural research days of 2008 but not read uptil now. anyway, have a super 2011, y’all. :-)
I am an Indian journalist with interests in energy, environment, climate and India’s ongoing slide into right-wing authoritarianism. My book, Despite the State, an examination of pervasive state failure and democratic decay in India, was published by Westland Publications, India, in January 2021. My work has won the Bala Kailasam Memorial Award; the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award; five Shriram Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism; and, more recently, been a finalist at the True Story Award and GIJN’s Global Shining Light Awards. Write to me at despitethestate@protonmail.com.
“Westland closure: Titles that are selling fast and a few personal recommendations,” by Chetana Divya Vasudev, Moneycontrol. (Because this happened too. In February, a year after DtS was released, Amazon decided to shutter Westland, which published the book. The announcement saw folks rushing to buy copies of Westland books before stocks run out.)
Fractured/Earth 
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