General Interest


“Do you want to wear an anklet or do you want to go to prison?” said a US consular officer in Hyderabad about the tagging of some Indian students in the United States to monitor their movements. These anklets contain a GPS device that closely monitors the movements of the students, and will alert officials in case they move beyond areas that they have been authorised to. The anklets provide a useful analogy to the Unique ID (UID) project by the government of India. Let me explain. In an article entitled Prison without walls, Graeme Wood argues that such radio […]

Understanding UID through “radio tags”


Binayak Sen has just received a life-term jail sentence for sedition or waging war against the state. The specific crime, according to the judgement, was that he conveyed three letters written by a Maoist leader to a Calcutta-based trader. This was supported by a broader claim that Binayak Sen and his wife Ilina have known Maoists, and that Binayak even had Maoist literature at his home! Callous evidence The evidence presented for the critical claims of the case have been disputed. He met Narayan Sanyal several times in jail, under the supervision of jailors and was searched before and after […]

Why even those who oppose Naxalism should support Binayak Sen


A recent survey says that Dalits of Uttar Pradesh have started using toothpaste and hair oil more regularly. Will it have an impact on democracy? Economic and Political Weekly recently carried the report of the survey by Devesh Kapur and others (Kapur et al. 2010). The paper argued that there have been important changes in grooming, eating practices and ceremonial consumption patterns of Dalits, and in general a rapid erosion of discriminatory practices that stigmatised the Dalits of Uttar Pradesh. This interesting survey draws attention to perceived discrimination, and how it has changed since the 1990s. The authors draw attention […]

Toothpaste, hair oil, and democracy



The 2010 Bihar election clearly reflected people’s voice, but sustained engagement by all sections of the society would be required for these voices to shape the government. In a press conference following the massive victory in the election, the Chief Minister Nitish Kumar remembered the massive changes that have happened in the electoral atmosphere of Bihar. As soon as the election got over, we would visit hospitals or families of dead people. It did not look like an election; it looked like war, he recalled. He also characterised erstwhile strategies of political parties during elections as logon ka kayal kam, […]

Has the Bihari citizen spoken?


Ever since I got interested in foreign policy issues during my high school days, there has been one strident demand by India’s Ministry of External Affairs: to get a permanent membership in the Security Council of United Nations. Today, India re-entered the Security Council by being elected as a non-permanent member, a post it will hold for the next two years. This has been greeted with euphoria in the country, and some are hoping that the clout of this position can help India to bargain for a permanent seat in the Security Council with its veto power. India has consistently […]

Should India seek a position in the Security Council?


There is almost an invariant formula for a Tamil television serial: a catchy title song with an amateurish dance, three units of sentiment, one unit of crying (with joy or sorrow), and one unit of suspense towards the end. The formula gets repeated at least ten times a day across television channels. Where is imagination? — The schizophrenia of the production houses between producing movies and television is fascinating. Women in Tamil television come through as strong, thinking, acting characters. The woman of the movies is typically a diva in trouble dependent on the hero to be rescued. Heroes have […]

Thoughts on Tamil television



National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is primarily a programme aimed at creating public assets that would be useful for the society at large. When NREGA was created, it relaxed this principle by allowing projects in private lands of selected marginalised communities including SCs and STs. The Minister for Rural Development is now trying to extend this by permitting works in private lands owned by small and marginal farmers who are not SCs and STs. This proposal has been welcomed by some like Mihir Shah and has been sharply criticised by Aruna Roy and Jean Drèze among others. I believe […]

Asset creation in private lands using NREGA: Problems & opportunities


The Minister for Rural Development, Mr C P Joshi has announced that he will revamp NREGA with some major changes, and the new scheme of things has been informally labelled “NREGA-2”. News reports have indicated that the new scheme will be unveiled on the birthday of Rajiv Gandhi. As of now the Ministry has not made available for public discussion the set of changes that will be made, but some ideas have been making their way to the media periodically. This article synthesizes these ideas, and provides links to articles debating the so-called NREGA-2.

What is NREGA-2?


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Zotero is a free-software to manage bibliographies and citations with advanced functions and an easy interface As a doctoral student a lot of my time goes into managing my references. Thankfully there are many tools around to help me manage my references and to speed up the process of inserting citations while I write my papers. After a lot of trial and error I settled on Refworks that I was really happy with. Unfortunately it is a paid software with a stiff fee that I may not be able to afford once I leave the university. Thankfully, a friend told […]

Zotero: The best citation tool around, and it’s free



Madras is one of those conservative cities that likes to keep its boys and girls at a safe distance. Parents clamour to get their children enrolled in colleges that are rather strict about this, and colleges have responded to this with enthusiasm. One famous college made a rule that girls will sit at the front of the college bus and boys behind and there will be a firewall of teachers in between. To counter this attraction other colleges have come up with separate roads and staircases inside the campus for boys and girls. In this context of competitive conservatism, I […]

Salsa in Madras: Social dance in a conservative city


NREGA has been relatively successful in many states in creating a large volume of employment, but critics have pointed out that the quality of projects is often poor. I agree with this assessment and argue that employment tends to be provided since there is a pressure for creating work and paying wages on a timely basis. But there is little pressure for quality from any source, be it administration, social movements or people at large. Unless we get some pressure group for ensuring quality, it is likely that quality of work in NREGA will continue to be poor in the years to come.

Who cares about quality in NREGA?





NREGA presents an unprecedented opportunity for disabled persons across India to earn a living and to showcase their talents. But as things stand, NREGA is not designed for disabled people to participate in it, but we can change it all with some tweaking.

NREGA for the disabled


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Mihir Shah argued in a recent article that trained workers should be appointed in each Panchayat if NREGA has to fulfill its promises. While Panchayats need personnel to implement NREGA, I argue that for the purpose of planning it would be better to create nodal agencies that take up planning sound works in a campaign mode.

Will trained workers in Panchayats improve the quality of NREGA?



“To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about…to be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected”. Proudhon quoted by James Scott in Seeing like a state. The power of information is often used by those in powerful positions to control others.  The right to information movement inverts this principle and turns the gaze on those in positions of power by making their actions visible and thus amenable to democratic control.  Sharing information […]

Politics, technology & accountability II





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Improving accountability depends on political and social initiatives, and not technological solutions. But technology can shape society and politics in limited ways. This article looks briefly at how the Unique id project can help in improving accountability of the government to people in India.

Will the Unique ID project improve accountability?


An application to send custom auto responses in Gmail Gmail’s Canned responses feature allows you to send fairly sophisticated customised auto-responses based on incoming mails.  First we have to draft different kinds of responses we would like to send and label them.  For example, being the party animal I am becoming, I’d want a mail like, “This sounds great, I am on my way” for any e-mail inviting me for a party.  I will create it and label “Party mail”.  I can then create a filter in Gmail to scan all my incoming mails based on senders, keywords in text, […]

Custom auto-reply in Gmail for grad students and secret lovers