Dalits Media Watch
News Updates 07.05.11
SC, ST lands to be developed with Rs. 521 cr. - The Hindu
http://www.hindu.com/2011/05/07/stories/2011050754260500.htm
Eight held for March 17 caste violence in Batour village - Indian Express
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/eight-held-for-march-17-caste-violence-in-batour-village/787095/0
DL terrorising Dalits: Jagan - The Hindu
http://www.hindu.com/2011/05/07/stories/2011050764020600.htm
Fergusson College student among 6 young Dalits held for Naxal 'links' - Indian Express
First adventure outside their hometowns - Indian Express
http://expressbuzz.com/cities/thiruvananthapuram/first-adventure-outside-their-hometowns/271895.html
First adventure outside their hometowns - Indian Express
http://expressbuzz.com/cities/thiruvananthapuram/first-adventure-outside-their-hometowns/271895.html
India: The Growth-Discrimination Nexus - Mrzine.monthly review
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/ghosh060511.html
The Hindu
SC, ST lands to be developed with Rs. 521 cr.
http://www.hindu.com/2011/05/07/stories/2011050754260500.htm
Staff Reporter
SANGAREDDY: The district administration is developing farm lands belonging to SCs and STs at an e+stimated cost of Rs. 521 crore. The plan was already approved and works commenced. The works were being taken up by District Water Management Agency (DWMA) under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS).
According to sources, 4,945 acres of fallow land belonging to these categories has been identified for the purpose and the estimated cost to develop the land was about Rs. 27.24 crore. As much as 89,490 acres of land belonging to 44,759 small and marginal farmers has been identified for improving its cultivability at a cost of Rs. 155.66 crore by providing 54, 578 man-days.
Similarly 36,213 acres of land pertaining to 16,033 ST farmers would be developed with a cost of Rs. 78.35 crore by providing 26,157 work days.
Indian Express
Eight held for March 17 caste violence in Batour village
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/eight-held-for-march-17-caste-violence-in-batour-village/787095/0
Sat May 07 2011, 01:10 hrs Panchkula:
After 50 days of the Batour caste violence, the Panchkula police arrested eight members of the upper caste in connection with the incident.
"We have arrested Lajja Ram, Vijay Kumar, Ranbir Singh, Sohan Singh, Rajbir Singh, Satish, Amandeep Singh and Updesh. The whole exercise is being led by DSP Ram Chander Rathi, who is the investigating officer in the case," said police spokesperson Inspector Raj Kumar.
In the early hours of Wednesday, the police started interrogation around 10 people. By night, eight were arrested.
The catalyst behind the development was probably DGP R S Dalal's assurance to CPM leader Subhashini Ali 48 hours ago that he would personally look into the case and take action against the accused within five days. Ali had led a rally of about 300 people up to the DGP office on Wednesday protesting against police inaction in the March 17 attack on Dalits at CPM office in the village.
Panchkula SP Maneesh Chaudhry has deputed around 150 policemen, two DSPs and three inspectors at the village to ensure that no untoward incident takes place in the area.
A dispute over earning of around Rs 15 lakh from shamlat land had led to a fight between the two groups in Batour village. One member of the Rajput community — armed with sticks — had attacked Dalits at the local CPM office. In the fight, Dalits Suresh Pal, Joginder, Satpal, Lakshman, Gyan Chand and Satpal had sustained injuries.
The police had registered a case same day under Section 3 of the SC/ST Act and Section 148 (rioting), 149 (unlawful assembly), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 452 (trespassing) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC against over 100 people.
Soon after the incident, the Dalits started facing repression in the village. The members of the upper caste prohibited their movement within the village. They were not even allowed to harvest crops by the landlords.
Following this, the National Commission of Scheduled Castes had sent a one-member team to the village to take stock of the situation.
On its intervention, the administration had agreed to give Rs 5,000 as compensation to each of the victim as mandated under the SC/ST Act.
A 14-member peace team was also formed to diffuse tension between the two groups. But struggle by the Dalits to get the accused arrested had continued.
The Hindu
DL terrorising Dalits: Jagan
http://www.hindu.com/2011/05/07/stories/2011050764020600.htm
Special Correspondent
Complaint lodged against Ravindra Reddy with election officer |
A Dalit woman accuses DL of assaulting villagers
Jagan urges them to vote fearlessly on May 8
KADAPA: YSR Congress president Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy visited Thudumuladinne Harijanawada in Khajipet mandal in Mydukur constituency on Friday and assured that he would stand by the Dalits, who alleged that they were assaulted, abused and their houses ransacked, by Congress candidate for Kadapa Lok Sabha constituency D.L. Ravindra Reddy and his followers on Wednesday night.
After interacting with the villagers, Mr. Jaganmohan Reddy warned that he would not tolerate attacks and vindictiveness towards Dalits and would spearhead a Statewide movement if the Minister and his aides meted out threats to them in future.
Action sought
He lodged a written complaint with District Election Officer Shashi Bhushan Kumar in Kadapa alleging that Dr. Ravindra Reddy and his aides terrorised, abused and stormed into the houses of the Dalits and demanded stern action. The DEO said he would apprise the Election Commission on the issue for action.
Allegations
A Dalit women of Thudumuladinne, two km from the Minister's native village Sunkesula, complained to Mr. Jaganmohan Reddy that the Minister visited their village with his followers in 10 vehicles around Wednesday night and threatened to set their houses ablaze, creating a fear psychosis among them. The women alleged that they were dragged by their shoulders.
When the women said the hamlet did not have proper water supply and lacked power supply and proper housing, the Minister retorted asking if Jagan would come to their rescue and advised them to get funds from the young leader.
Assuring that Nandyal MLA Sobha Nagi Reddy and former MLA S. Raghurami Reddy would visit them often and protect their interests, Mr. Jaganmohan Reddy urged the Dalits to cast votes without any fear on May 8.
Indian Express
Fergusson College student among 6 young Dalits held for Naxal 'links'
Sat May 07 2011, 02:00 hrs Pune:
The Bhosale family may still find it hard to believe that their brightest and most educated member, attending one of the country's topmost colleges, Pune's Fergusson College, is accused of being a Naxalite. Siddhartha Bhosale, a Master's student in Economics, who also took the entrance exams for becoming a Class I government officer, was one of the six alleged Naxalites arrested by the the Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) near Chandwad in Nashik on April 29.
All the six are Dalits and the five arrested with Bhosale are young Dalit women, three of whom are graduate students. The seniormost is Angelo Sontakke, wife of Naxal leader Milind Teltumbde, who was allegedly behind the February 2009 attack in Gadhchiroli that killed about 15 policemen.
The other four: Sushma Ramteke alias Shraddha Gurav, arrested from Pirangut in Pune; Mayuri Bhagat (23) alias Jenny; Jyothi Chorghe (19) and Anuradha Sonule (23), all arrested from the Shivajinagar area of Pune. Naxal literature, cash, a laptop, cellphones and other items were seized from the suspects.
Bhagat, a native of Chandrapur, is a graduate in Arts who shifted to Mundwa in Pune to work with Sontakke. Chorghe and Sonule, also Arts graduates, stayed in a small room in Bhosari and allegedly worked as couriers for the group's activity.
Bhosale, from Ahmednagar, lives in a small, rented house in Bhagyoday Nagar, Kondhwa, in Pune. Police said he was trained in Gadhchiroli by top Naxal operatives and was assigned the task of recruiting youngsters from Pune and Nashik into the Maoist fold. Bhosale's arrest and his brief, police said, has underlined their suspicion that the Maoists are targeting colleges and institutions in urban areas to recruit young cadres from Dalit or backward classes.
"It was a huge shock for us to when we got to know about his arrest. He was a very sincere student, he used to read lot of books. He also took the competitive examination of MPSC (Maharashtra Public Service Commission)," said his elder brother Chandrakant, who works as a peon in a village school.
"He was a very active young man and never tolerated injustice," his brother told The Indian Express. "We could make out from the way he talked that he was strongly against corruption. But he never just thought of Dalits or backward classes. He was concerned about the welfare of all. It was unbelievable when police told us that he was linked to Maoists."
Said Chandrakant: "We are four brothers staying together in our rented house. He used to stay out for a few days but not for long. He used to contact us on phone when he would be away from home. We found he used to stay with friends or relatives. We never questioned him as he is the most educated among us and we believe he would never do anything wrong." His younger brother Sagar said that they belong to the Mahar caste, a backward community.
Investigators believe that Bhosale was "indoctrinated" to join the Naxals and trained in Gadhchiroli a few months ago. He is also believed to have been paid to recruit youngsters. Not without reason. Ravindra Kadam, DIG (Anti Naxal operations), said that the Naxals' "Golden Corridor Committee" was set up to target students and labourers in industrial centres of Gujarat and Maharashtra, especially in cities like Pune, Mumbai, Thane and Nashik.
Police said they are exploring how these young men and women are linked to the Golden Corridor Group and how far this network spreads.
Indian Express
First adventure outside their hometowns
http://expressbuzz.com/cities/thiruvananthapuram/first-adventure-outside-their-hometowns/271895.html
Last Updated : 06 May 2011 09:08:24 AM IST
For most of them, it was their first adventure outside their hometowns. The 450 students who visited the city, all the way from Wayanad, Kasargod and Kannur, enjoyed their first excursion to the capital to their hearts fill.
The children, belonging to SC/ST/minority communities, were given the chance to step outside their districts by the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA) as part of the train tours jointly organised with IRCTC (Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited).
The students visited the Priyadarshini Planetarium in the afternoon where they had an interaction with Sukhdev, scientist with ISRO who was part of Chandrayaan Moon Mission.
The children, who had more than 50 people escorting them, including SSA officials, trainers and parents, were then taken to Sanghumugham in the evening, where a cultural evening was organised for them. Poets D Vinayachandran and Murukan Kattakada were present. The group members returned to their hometowns in the night train that left here by 9 pm.
Mrzine.monthly review
India: The Growth-Discrimination Nexus
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/ghosh060511.html
by Jayati Ghosh
Many people, especially in India, tend to believe that the process of economic growth is likely to be mostly liberating for those oppressed by various forms of social discrimination and exclusion. The argument is that market forces break open age-old social norms, especially those of caste and gender, that have for so long denied opportunities and restricted options for so many.
Unfortunately, the current Indian reality is more complex than that. The strength of Indian large capital, which is leading the current economic boom, derives at least partly from the persistence and even expansion of a wide range of workers engaged in precarious and low-productivity employment. Most significantly from the point of view of the Indian corporate sector, different degrees of outsourcing have blurred the lines between formal and informal activities, and the proliferation of such low-paying self-employment has become an important means of reducing costs for the corporate sector as well as passing on the risks of production to smaller units that are essentially part of the working class.
The extent to which all successful formal economic activities in India rely on the implicit subsidies provided by cheap informal labour is largely unrecognised. Yet corporate profitability in India hinges substantially on the lowering of a wide range of fixed costs through outsourcing. Thus, for example, the success of the much-lauded software industry in India is only partly because of cheaper skilled IT professionals compared to their international counterparts. A significant part of the lower costs comes from the entire range of support services: cleaning and maintenance of offices, transport, security, back office work, catering, and so on. These are usually outsourced to smaller companies that hire temporary workers with much lower wages, no job security, very long hours of work and hardly any form of worker protection or other benefits. Without the cost advantages indirectly conferred by these low paid workers, the domestic software industry would find it much harder to compete internationally. The same is true of a wide range of corporate activities across both manufacturing and the newer services.
These processes of direct and indirect underwriting of the costs of the corporate sector have been greatly assisted by the ability of employers in India to utilise social characteristics to ensure lower wages to certain categories of workers. Caste and other forms of social discrimination have a long tradition in India, and they have interacted with capitalist accumulation to generate peculiar forms of labour market segmentation that are probably unique to Indian society. Numerous studies have found that social categories are strongly correlated with the incidence of poverty and that both occupation and wages differ dramatically across social categories. The National Sample Surveys reveal that the probability of being in a low wage occupation is significantly higher for STs, SCs, Muslims and OBCs (in that order) compared to the general ''caste Hindu'' population. This is only partly because of differences in education and level of skill, which are also important and which in turn reflect the differential provision of education across social categories.
Such caste-based discrimination has operated in both urban and rural labour markets. For example, even in a major metropolitan area like Delhi, which is one of the epicentres of economic expansion, there continues to significant discrimination against Dalit workers operating dominantly through the mechanism of assignment to jobs, with Dalits largely entering poorly-paid ''dead-end'' jobs. These are actually essential jobs in both production, such as sweepers, loaders, unskilled construction workers, and services, such as shop and sales assistants and security guards and the like. Methods of recruitment based on contacts, which are widely prevalent in such low-skilled occupations, cause past discrimination to carry over to the present and thereby condemn lower caste groups to providing poorly remunerated labour that is nonetheless essential to income generation in the economy as a whole.
Similarly, empirical studies of caste behaviour in rural India have found that there are many ways in which caste practices operate to reduce the access of the lower castes to local resources as well as to income earning opportunities, thereby forcing them to provide their labour at the cheapest possible rates to employers. One study (Ghanshyam Shah, Harsh Mander, Sukhdeo Thorat, Satish Deshpande and Amita Baviskar, Untouchability in Rural India, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006) of various caste-based practices in rural areas of 11 states (Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh including Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu) found, in addition to the well-known lack of assets, a large number of social practices that effectively restricted the economic activity of lower caste and Dalit groups, and forced them to supply very low wage labour in harsh and usually precarious conditions.
In 73 per cent of the villages surveyed in this study, Dalits could not enter non-Dalit homes. In 70 per cent of villages, Dalits could not eat with non-Dalits. In 64 per cent of villages, Dalits could not enter common temples. In 36 per cent of survey villages, Dalits could not enter village shops. In around one-third of the survey villages, Dalits were not accepted as traders dealing with commonly used items of consumption or production. These practices in turn can be used to keep wages of Dalit workers (who are extremely constrained in their choice of occupation) low, even in period of otherwise rising wages. And these practices persist even during the period of the Indian economy's much-vaunted dynamic growth.
But the important point to note here is not simply that such practices continue to exist, but that they have become the base on which the economic accumulation process rests. In other words, capitalism in India, especially in its most recent globally integrated variant, has used past and current modes of social discrimination and exclusion to its own benefit, to facilitate the extraction of surplus and ensure greater flexibility and bargaining to employers when dealing with workers. So social categories are not ''independent'' of the accumulation process -- rather, they allow for more surplus extraction, because they reinforce low employment generating (and therefore persistently low wage) tendencies of growth.
Similar tendencies are evident in patterns of gender discrimination as well. With respect to women's work, there have been four apparently contradictory trends: simultaneous increases in the incidence of paid labour, underpaid labour, unpaid labour, and the open unemployment of women. This is a paradox, since it is generally expected that when employment increases, then unemployment comes down; or when paid labour increases, then unpaid labour decreases.
For urban women, the increase in regular work has dominantly been in services, including most importantly the relatively low-paid and less desirable activity of domestic service, along with some manufacturing. In manufacturing, there has been some recent growth of petty home-based activities of women, typically with very low remuneration, performing outsourced as part of a larger production chain. But explicitly export-oriented employment, even in special zones set up for the purpose, still accounts for only a tiny fraction of women's paid work in urban India. Meanwhile, in rural India self-employment has come to dominate women's activities even in non-agricultural occupations, largely because of the evident difficulty of finding paid work.
In this period of economic boom, average real wages of women workers increased relatively little over the ten year period 1993-94 to 2004-05 despite rapid increases in national income over this period, and for some categories of women workers (rural graduates and urban illiterate females) real wages actually declined. What is more, there were fairly sharp increases in gender gaps in wages, are now among the highest in the world.
Even public services rely heavily on the underpaid labour of women. While a privileged minority of women in government employment continue to access the benefits of the government behaving as a ''model employer'', new employment for the purpose of providing essential public services has been concentrated in low-remuneration activities with uncertain contracts and hardly any benefits. This is true of school education (with the employment of para-teachers) as well as health and nutrition (with reliance on anganwadi workers and ASHAs).
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is the only public intervention to make some difference in this, with evidence of gender gaps in rural wage work coming down as a result of the implementation of the scheme.
Conditions of self-employment among women show many of the disturbing tendencies of wage employment. Women's self-employment in non-agriculture is largely characterised by both low expectations regarding incomes and remuneration and substantial non-fulfilment of even these low expectations. Despite some increase in high-remuneration self-employment among professionals and micro-entrepreneurs, in general the expansion of self-employment seems to be a distress-driven process, determined by the lack of availability of sufficient paid work on acceptable terms. Case studies and evidence from large surveys of the NSS both suggest that payment for home-based work, which is typically on piece rates and accounts for increasing proportions of the economic activity of women, have been declining not only in real but even in nominal terms in many urban centres, despite the economic dynamism of the areas in general.
Similarly, unpaid labour of women is likely to have been increasing because of public policies such as reduced social expenditure that place a larger burden of care on women, or privatised or degraded common property resources or inadequate infrastructure facilities that increase time spent on provisioning essential goods for the household, or simply because even well-meaning policies (such as for afforestation) are often gender-blind.
Once again, the relevant point here is not simply that such gender differences exist, but that they -- and therefore the particular forms that patriarchy takes in India -- are closely intertwined with processes of capitalist accumulation. So the recent growth has not broken existing pattern of social discrimination, instead it has relied on them to take forward the growth story.
.Arun Khote
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of "Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC")
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Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
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