The Covid pandemic has made life difficult for 67-year-old Shyam Soni, a sculptor by profession and a resident of Jaipur’s Shastri Nagar. With hardly any work coming in, Soni is struggling hard to make a living for the last 18 months. His son 44-year-old Rahul Soni who was also into sculpting has already left the profession and joined his friend[Read More...]
If you enter any kitchen in rural and small town India chances are you will see these gleaming objects all around. On top of the stove, used to store drinking water, near the space for worshipping various deities, as dinner plates. These are the copper and brass utensils that have been part of Indian homes for centuries – handed down[Read More...]
Bhubaneswar: As the sun rises over the horizon at the nondescript and pristine Chappar village in Odisha’s Koraput district, the radio comes on. For the past year, the community radio station ‘Dhimsa’ has become the Adivasi population’s primary source of information related to COVID-19, providing regular updates on government guidelines and safety protocols. The first programme begins at 6 am[Read More...]
It’s a beautiful new beginning on the day of Rakhi across some villages and small towns in several districts of Bengal. Resurrecting a tradition started by Rabindranath Tagore, volunteers of the Bangla Sanskriti Manch have organized intimate get-togethers with locals. Everyone is tying rakhi on everyone’s hands, and there is a smile on every face. Here, it is a festival[Read More...]
On August 18 as members of the Movement against Unemployment hit the streets of the Madhya Pradesh capital Bhopal they were brutally caned by the police as they tried to move towards the Chief Minister’s residence in a bid to gherao it. Cases were also filed against many of the protestors, who were demanding jobs and the filling up of vacant[Read More...]
“We are working very hard as frontline workers since the first wave of Covid-19 started. But we have neither got the recognition we deserved nor the money for extra work.” The lament of Anju, an ASHA worker for the last four years in Phulpur tehsil near Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh represents the sentiments of a bulk of the state’s over 1.5[Read More...]
For the third time, in the last 18 months, Meha Saxena, studying at a premier private school in Jaipur was removed from her class WhatsApp group by the admin, who also happens to be the class teacher. The reason: her parents were unable to pay her school fees on time. Her father, who was a private employee lost his job[Read More...]
Locals estimate that the employment of almost 50,000 people has been affected in Jharkhand’s Deoghar area alone, owing to cancellations of the Kanwar Yatra and Shravani Mela amidst COVID-19. Bihar: 35-year-old Amit Kumar Saha and his brother Rohit Kumar run a pooja shop in Sultanganj town in Bihar’s Bhagalpur district. The family, which lives right behind the shop, has been[Read More...]
In the midst of the gloom caused by the Covid pandemic there is a uniquely inspiring story from Madhya Pradesh. It is about how a group of villagers smartly leveraged the ongoing vaccination drive to win their long running battle against corruption in a prestigious government scheme. The story starts in the pre-Covid period, when the villagers of Dularia gram[Read More...]
The Covid pandemic has ushered in a massive ray of hope on the ground for the Left in West Bengal, thanks to the emergence of the youthful Red Volunteers responding to the emergency and crisis situation in Kolkata and across remote parts of the state. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) may have scored zero in the 2021 assembly and[Read More...]
