'People-work'

  Has UNAIDS Been Caught Napping? Look who is Paying the Price for the UN’s Political Fence Sitting   I was hoping I would never have to write this. That no one would have to write this, ever. UNAIDS and civil society campaigners have had a special relationship of trust and collaboration. But now that relationship seems to have chipped. Irreparably, even.   Two shockingly opposite statements have emerged after the adoption of the 2016 Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS  by Member States of the UN at the recently concluded UN General Assembly Special Session last week.   Michel Sidibe, Executive Director of UNAIDS, was quoted in the New York Times  saying that he felt ‘the declaration was something to be proud of’.   In sharp contrast, campaigners from across the world have called the Political Declaration a ‘high level failure’. In  a scathing statement  issued by the global coalitions of civil society organisations,...

  SDGs are our dreams gone official I t is because we dream of a perfect future is why the present becomes worth the fight. Exactly one year ago in September 2015, all nations of the world adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the UN general Assembly. At this gathering of world leaders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi endorsed the #globalgoals , committing himself and all of us to their achievement by 2030. And this is what is dazzling about these 17 new goals and their 169 targets. Three generations, including ours, have lived through the struggles and victories of the last hundred years, but it is only now for the first time that we have collectively started dreaming about the world through the eyes of a future generation, our children. What kind of world will your little daughter find herself in when she is a young adult? Will she be surrounded by prosperity, beauty, peace, dignity and equality for them, or will she find herself struggling in a broken planet ...

  One year since the SDGs – how committed is the Indian Parliament? Sustainable development goals (SDGs) are proof that the conversation on the intersectionality between economic, social and environmental change has finally come of age and is now hard to ignore. These new set of 17 global goals, along with their 169 targets are not just transformative in their ambition for the last person in the queue. They are in fact inviting us to participate in the tectonic shift in development thinking, to step out of our comfort zones to examine new solutions and new ways of doing business. And lets remember, these goals were generated through four years of participation of millions of people around the world and not by a bunch of experts huddled in a basement.   However, in India, the discussion on pathways to achieve the goals have, over the past year, become the domain of central and state level bureaucrats who haven’t amassed any significant glory for their ability and inclinat...

  India's Warped Idea Of The 'Demographic Dividend': Extracting From The Youth, But Not Investing In Them India is all set to test the assumption that the youth bulge is a source of demographic dividend and an economic advantage. The assumption is that greater the number of people in an economy who work, save and pay taxes, higher will be the economic growth. With 356 million 10-24 year-olds, India has the world’s largest youth population in the world.   Three young girls seem to have tested the assumption with their bodies. Their verdict is that all things remaining the same, demographic dividend may be on life support.     A fifteen year old government school student in Ganjam gave birth in her classroom. She bled in the bathroom, confused, she ran back to her class, but before her class teacher could get help, she delivered a child right there. The infant later died. The young girl went home with her parents. She will now recuperate at the mercy of a qu...

   Why Civil Society Action Is Indispensable For The Success of Democracy In India The deepening conflict between Govt. of India and civil society is really a battle for primacy between the ‘rule’ of representative democracy and the imagination of a participatory democracy. The tragic irony is that civil society has been reduced to obsequious seekers of mercy and crumbs at the doorstep of the Indian state and its rulers. While profit seekers have the ears of the highest officials, non-profits are made to wait, chastised and diminished. Earlier this month, while the UN Human Rights Council stated that giving ‘space to civil society is not optional’, the Government of India warned that “civil society must operate within the framework of domestic laws”. Renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz went so far as to say that ‘India is looking bad’ for its crackdown on civil society voices. How is representative democracy different from participatory democracy? In a representative ...