| Who is responsible for the coaching institute deaths? Rainwater? The SUV driver? Rau’s IAS? MCD? Or the CM, Arvind Kejriwal? The Old Rajinder Nagar tragedy was man-made. Despite an elected government and an over-interventionist LG, there’s no visible accountability. Pawan Khera wrote about what a jailed CM can still do. Had Sheila Dikshit been alive, she would have applied for bail, come out, spent time acknowledging the pain of students and their parents, answered questions and restored the confidence of worried parents. Karanjeet Kaur wrote this is the price of ambition in young India. India’s demographic dividend is dying a slow, painful death. It is getting electrocuted in the streets and drowning in basement libraries at “student sweatshops” masquerading as coaching centres.
The Supreme Court order allowing states to sub-classify SC-ST quota and allow room for the marginalised among the community is a ‘constitutional amendment by stealth’, wrote Dilip Mandal. And the court, he said, is acting like the Constituent Assembly. The problem with the recent judgment is that it changes the definition of SCs and STs without going to the legislature. While states can act on their own, they can only do so after an amendment to the Constitution, which hasn’t been done.
There’s open hostility between the BJP-led centre and Opposition CMs, wrote Sagarika Ghose after some Opposition CMs walked out of the NITI Aayog meeting. Every Opposition-ruled state today has voiced complaints about discrimination in central funding, including Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. Modi, as a chief minister-turned-prime minister, has shown blatant disrespect for other CMs. The BJP’s talk of the so-called “double engine” model is totally unconstitutional. Does it mean that states where the BJP is not in power have no engines?
Move over climate change, nuclear threat, new cold war. There are dire warnings that it is all going to end, not from one of these but apparently from The Great Baby Bust in the wealthier nations of the West and Asia. The question is, will this panic become a woman’s burden? State funds are being offered to married women to have children. Are they really working? Women are not baby-breeding machines that you can turn on and off. This is why we need feminist groups to enter this conversation, I wrote. It shouldn’t just be left to economists to design solutions. Feminists will come up with a way without compromising hard-won freedoms.
Should West Bengal be partitioned? Again? In the last week or so, nearly half a dozen BJP leaders have demanded that the borders of West Bengal be redrawn, with chunks hived off to the Northeast or as separate Union Territories. The BJP in West Bengal is internally divided into competing factions and remains clueless about the state, wrote Monideepa Banerjie. The plan seems to be to cut up the state in such a way that Mamata Banerjee’s so-called 30 per cent Muslim vote bank is splintered badly, allowing the BJP to achieve what it has failed to do in the past: win an election and rule West Bengal, even if in a diminished geography.
My Ground Reports team offered continuous coverage throughout the week chronicling every angle in the UPSC aspirants tragedy.
The horrific death of students in a basement located in the UPSC coaching hub in Delhi spotlights the predatory, hyper-competitive and opaque ecosystem that the coaching institutes have created in India’s big cities. Nootan Sharma spent the entire week in the coaching neighbourhoods of Delhi—where aspirants for UPSC, CA and NEET live. A mafia-like nexus of brokers, landlords, and institutes prey on the desperate ambition of young men and women who pause the best years of their lives to pursue the IAS-IPS-IFS and MBBS dreams. Their living conditions are in the spotlight now but years of complaints have gone unheard by this nexus. Government authorities have consistently ignored dire warnings.
“No one sees us as human, for them we are just a source of income. They just exploit us. From coaching institutes to brokers and landlords. There are coaching mafia, landlord mafia, and broker mafia. They only understand money,” one UPSC aspirant said.
Soumya Pillai travelled to Kolkata and wrote about a war that the Indian Science Congress is waging against the central government. On the face of it, the battle is about funds and prestige. But at heart, it is a fight for independence, and it’s playing out in the corridors of power, courts, and police stations.
“I am the elected general president. They sealed my office and threatened to file a police complaint against me like I was some criminal,” said Goutam Paul, a noted physiologist. The government of India refuses to recognise the newly elected executive council of ISCA. It cut off the new members’ access to ISCA’s official website. |
