Implementing the Street Vendors Act  https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-problems-with-the-street-vendors-act/article68124512.ece  May 01, 2024
Celebrated as a progressive legislation, the Act now faces numerous challenges in its implementation  Street vendors, estimated to constitute 2.5% of any city’s population, play multifaceted roles in city life. Local vegetable sellers and food vendors are essential providers of daily services. Vending offers many migrants and the urban poor a source of modest yet consistent income. The vendors also make city life affordable for others by providing vital links in the food, nutrition, and goods distribution chain at reasonable prices.

https://ccs.in/progress-report-2020-implementing-street-vendors-act  Download the report https://ccs.in/sites/default/files/2022-08/progress-report-2020-implementing-the-street-vendors-act.pdf

 https://www.civilsocietyonline.com/column/living-rivers/drowning-in-sin/  The Ganga is not just a river but considered mother to millions of Hindus, deeply embedded in both faith and daily life. Beyond religious beliefs, it serves as a vital lifeline for a large part of India’s population. The tradition of taking a holy dip during the Mahakumbh is rooted in the belief that, during specific planetary alignments, the waters of the Ganga transform into ‘Amrit’ — the nectar of immortality.

Given the river’s travel time, water released from Narora Barrage takes approximately 10 days to reach the Triveni Sangam in Prayagraj, while water from Tehri Dam takes around 22 days. Therefore, these releases are carefully timed in advance of the key bathing days to maintain sufficient water levels.

Flow is a master variable in river ecosystems — when a river’s natural flow improves, it tends to cleanse itself through dilution and sediment transport. However, the greatest challenge remains on-site sewage treatment. 

In an affidavit submitted to the NGT in December 2024, the Uttar Pradesh government reported that out of the 471.92 MLD of total sewage, 293 MLD is discharged into 81 drains flowing into the Ganga and Yamuna, and 178.31 MLD enters the sewage network, which is linked to 10 sewage treatment plants (STPs) with a total capacity of 390 MLD.

Of the 81 drains carrying sewage into the Ganga, 37 have been connected to STPs, treating approximately 216 MLD of wastewater. However, the remaining 44 drains, which carry 77.42 MLD of sewage, remain untapped and untreated. 

To manage the massive influx of pilgrims, approximately 1,45,000 toilets and urinals were installed. However, many became unusable due to a lack of timely cleaning and maintenance. With over 10,000 sanitation workers operating in shifts, the sheer scale of the gathering made waste management a monumental challenge. Even with 120 tippers and 40 compactor trucks, the solid waste generated during the special bathing days overwhelmed the available infrastructure, highlighting the urgent need for more efficient waste management strategies in future events.

 How Facebook Worked Closely with the Modi Government to Push Free Basics - The Wire 

Recent revelations detailed in Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams have shed light on the Facebook’s controversial Free Basics programme in India and shown that the social media giant was closely aligned with the Modi government all through, raising serious concerns about the relationship between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and the US-based corporation. The book provides a behind-the-scenes account of Facebook’s aggressive lobbying efforts and its collaboration with Indian officials, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office, to push Free Basics – a programme criticised for violating net neutrality. 

Wynn-Williams was head of global affairs/ public policy for Facebook between 2011 and 2018. Her account highlights how these efforts were designed to bypass public dissent and regulatory scrutiny. Wynn-Williams’ revelations paint a picture of manipulation, corporate overreach and political complicity. Meta, as Facebook is now known, has called the book “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”.

16/03/2025

Anyone reading the headlines in the morning newspaper can be forgiven for believing that Indians have lost their capacity for reasonable thought. A few days ago, we read that audiences of a Bollywood film, Chaava, went into strong hysterics at the sight of the actor, the dishy Akshay Khanna, playing Aurangzeb. Then we read that ten mosques in Uttar Pradesh’s Sambhal have been covered in plastic and canvas sheets because they happen to fall in the way of a planned Holi procession. 

The Lost Art of Thinking in an Age of Manufactured Outrage - The Wire 

The implications are obvious, processions rapidly turn into mobs, and mobs run amuck destroying everything that offends their rather ‘delicate’ sensibilities. These days anything can offend, a piece of meat, a particular sort of beard, women’s clothing, magnificent structures that were constructed in times of the Mughals, and of course mosques.

At a time when China is making giant strides towards becoming a super-power, when India is poised for economic decline, and when democratic and human development indicators are rapidly falling, Indians are embroiled in these petty wars over religion and a history that goes back 300 years. 

This is extremely convenient for the ruling class because no one has the time to question unemployment and the dismal state of education in our country. They are too busy lamenting over manufactured historical wrongs. But what of us Indians? Have we lost the capacity to even think? Looks like it.

Think of the importance of thinking without necessarily going into the merits or demerits of Descartes’ famous aphorism ‘I think therefore I am’. Let us recollect Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that grants the right to freedom of thought, belief and worship. The right to freedom of thought is, arguably, of enormous import. Thinking about or thinking through a personal or a political predicament: a movie we watched, a piece of music we listened to, a book we read, a conversation we had, our emotional experiences, or just about the minutiae of everyday life sparks off chains of critical reflection. 

by Neera Chandhoke

16/03/2025

https://openingdoorz.com/bombay-riots-and-blasts/ 

https://www.republicworld.com/india/ranjani-srinivasan-deported-scholar-journey-and-controversial-exit-from-the-us   First it was Soros, now every other scholarship, whose alumni protested..

Columbia University student 𝗥𝗮𝗻𝗷𝗮𝗻𝗶 𝗦𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘀𝗮𝗻, was mocked as a "fleeing Urban Naxal" by right-wing social media in India, in posts that shared a US Homeland Security surveillance footage showing her lugging a bag at a NY airport.. ..Her student visa was revoked suddenly by the Trump administration, apparently for participating in protests at Columbia last year against the carnage in Gaza and US support for Israel.

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𝑁𝑒𝑤 𝑌𝑜𝑟𝑘 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 reports :

By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Hamed Aleaziz
March 15

The first knock at the door came eight days ago, on a Friday morning.

Three federal immigration agents showed up at a Columbia University apartment searching for Ranjani Srinivasan, who had recently learned her student visa had been revoked. Ms. Srinivasan, an international student from India, did not open the door.

She was not home when the agents showed up again the next night, just hours before a former Columbia student living in campus housing, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained, roiling the university. Ms. Srinivasan packed a few belongings, left her cat behind with a friend and jumped on a flight to Canada at LaGuardia Airport.

When the agents returned a third time, this past Thursday night, and entered her apartment with a judicial warrant, she was gone.

“The atmosphere seemed so volatile and dangerous,” Ms. Srinivasan, 37, said on Friday in an interview with The New York Times, her first public remarks since leaving. “So I just made a quick decision.”

Ms. Srinivasan, a Fulbright recipient who was pursuing a doctoral degree in urban planning, was caught in the dragnet of President Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators through the use of federal immigration powers. She is one of a handful of noncitizens that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has targeted at Columbia in recent days.

In the week since that first knock at the door, Ms. Srinivasan says she has struggled to understand why the State Department abruptly revoked her student visa without explanation, leading Columbia to withdraw her enrollment from the university because her legal status had been terminated.

On Friday, while considering her future in Canada, she received some answers.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that characterized Ms. Srinivasan as a terrorist sympathizer and accused her of advocating violence and being “involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization.” The department did not provide any evidence for its allegations.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, posted surveillance footage on social media that showed Ms. Srinivasan lugging a suitcase at LaGuardia as she fled to Canada. Secretary Noem celebrated Ms. Srinivasan’s departure as a “self-deportation.”

“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the United States of America,” Secretary Noem wrote on X. “When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country.”

Ms. Srinivasan’s lawyers have vehemently denied those allegations and have accused the Trump administration of revoking her visa for engaging in “protected political speech,” saying she was denied “any meaningful form of due process” to challenge the visa revocation.

“Secretary Noem’s tweet is not only factually wrong but fundamentally un-American,” Naz Ahmad, one of Ms. Srinivasan’s lawyers, said in a statement, adding: “For at least a week, D.H.S. has made clear its intent to punish her for her speech, and they have failed in their efforts.”

In response to questions, officials with the Homeland Security Department said that when Ms. Srinivasan renewed her visa last year, she failed to disclose two court summonses related to protests on Columbia’s campus. The department did not say how the summonses made her a terrorist sympathizer.

“I’m fearful that even the most low-level political speech or just doing what we all do — like shout into the abyss that is social media — can turn into this dystopian nightmare where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathizer and making you, literally, fear for your life and your safety,” Ms. Srinivasan said in the interview on Friday.

Ms. Srinivasan’s current situation can be traced back to last year, when she was arrested at an entrance to Columbia’s campus the same day that pro-Palestinian protesters occupied Hamilton Hall, a university building. She said she had not been a part of the break-in but was returning to her apartment that evening after a picnic with friends, wading through a churning crowd of protesters and barricades on West 116th Street, when the police pushed her and arrested her.

She was briefly detained and received two summonses, one for obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic and another for refusing to disperse. Her case was quickly dismissed and did not result in a criminal record, according to her lawyers and court documents. Ms. Srinivasan said that she never faced disciplinary action from the university and was in good academic standing.

“She was taken in with roughly 100 other people after being blocked from returning to her apartment and getting stuck in the street,” said Nathan Yaffe, one of her lawyers. “The court recognized this when it dismissed her case as having no merit. Ranjani was just trying to walk home.”

Ms. Srinivasan said she did not disclose the summonses in the visa renewal form later in the year because her case had been dismissed in May and she did not have a conviction.

“Because I had not and the charges were dismissed, I sort of marked it as ‘no,’” she said. “But maybe that was my mistake. I would have been happy to disclose that, but just the way they had questioned us was sort of assuming that you had a conviction.”

The State Department has broad discretion to revoke student visas, which it typically does if someone overstays or the government discovers fraud; convictions and arrests can also lead to revocations. Immigration lawyers said it was highly unusual for ICE to descend on college campuses searching for students with recently revoked visas as the agency has the past few days at Columbia, rattling many students.

“It is more rare for the government to act the way it has, such as in the cases in Columbia University, where they’re going on campus and conducting an operation to apprehend somebody,” said Greg Chen, a lawyer at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

The Trump administration’s targeting of students with visas at a university enveloped in a cultural firestorm opened a new front in the president’s attempts to ramp up deportations and tamp down pro-Palestinian views. The president canceled $400 million in grants to the university after accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students. The arrests and attempted detentions of the Columbia students has led to an uproar among Democrats and civil rights groups.

Jason Houser, a senior ICE official during the Biden administration, said that “criminalizing free speech through radicalized immigration enforcement is a direct attack on our democracy.”

Last week, ICE arrested Mr. Khalil, a green card holder who had become a leading face of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. Mr. Trump hailed the arrest as “the first of many to come.” On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had arrested Leqaa Kordia, who had been involved in the protests at Columbia. Federal officials said she had overstayed her visa and had previously been arrested at a Columbia protest in April.

Unlike Mr. Khalil, Ms. Srinivasan said she was not an activist or a member of any group that organized demonstrations on campus.

Ms. Srinivasan said she was an architect who came to the United States from India as part of the Fulbright program in 2016 and that she enrolled at Columbia in 2020. She said she was in the fifth year of an urban planning doctoral program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and was supposed to graduate in May.

She said that her activity on social media had been mostly limited to liking or sharing posts that highlighted “human rights violations” in the war in Gaza. And she said that she had signed several open letters related to the war, including one by architecture scholars that called for “Palestinian liberation.”

“I’m just surprised that I’m a person of interest,” she said. “I’m kind of a rando, like, absolute rando,” she said, using slang for random.

It was March 5 when she received an email from the U.S. Consulate in Chennai, India, indicating that her visa had been revoked. The notice did not provide a reason, saying only that “information has come to light” that may make her ineligible for a visa.

Confused, she emailed Columbia’s office for international students the following day seeking guidance. An official informed her that the revocation would take effect only if she left the country and that she could remain in the United States to pursue her studies for the time being, according to emails reviewed by The Times.

The next morning, on March 7, Ms. Srinivasan was on a call with an official from the international student office when the federal agents first knocked on the door of her apartment, which is off campus but operated by Columbia. The official told Ms. Srinivasan to call campus security, while her roommate engaged with the agents from behind the closed apartment door.

In an interview, her roommate said that the agents had initially identified themselves as “police,” declined to provide their badge numbers, saying they feared they would be doxxed, and stood to the side of the door so that they were not visible through the peep hole. The roommate, a fellow Columbia student who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety, said that the building’s doorman, who is an immigrant, later told her that he had let the three agents into the building because he was frightened.

Ms. Srinivasan abandoned the apartment that night, so she was not there when officials returned the following evening. Her roommate once again refused to open the door to let them in and recorded audio of the interaction, which she shared with The Times.

“We were here yesterday,” one of the officials says, believing he was talking to Ms. Srinivasan because the roommate had not identified herself. “We’re here today. We’re here tonight. Tomorrow. You’re probably scared. If you are, I get it. The reality is, your visa was revoked. You are now amenable to removal proceedings.”

The official stressed that he and his colleagues were not trying to break the law, that she would have the right to go before an immigration judge and left a phone number for the Homeland Security Department that she could call if she had “a change of heart.”

“That’s the easiest and fastest way to do this, as opposed to you being in your apartment and us knocking on your door every day, which is just silly,” he said. “You’re a very smart person. It’s just not — it’s not worth it.”

The next day, Ms. Srinivasan received an email from Columbia saying that homeland security had alerted the university that her visa had been revoked and her legal status in the country had been terminated. Because she had to immediately leave the United States, the email said, her enrollment at Columbia had been withdrawn and she had to vacate student housing.

The email, signed by the university’s international student office, said that, in compliance with its legal obligations, Columbia was asking her to meet with the homeland security agents. The university declined to comment on Ms. Srinivasan’s case.

On Thursday night, three federal agents returned to Ms. Srinivasan’s apartment with a search warrant signed by a judge and went inside to search for her, according to her roommate and lawyers.

By then, Ms. Srinivasan was already in Canada.

India may not be the promised land for Elon Musk  https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/telecom/telecom-news/india-may-not-be-the-promised-land-for-elon-musk/articleshow/119038423.cms?from=mdr industry experts believe direct-to-cell satellite broadband is unlikely to disrupt India's wireless market due to several factors. Firstly, the technology still faces technical challenges, such as difficulties in maintaining reliable smartphone connectivity due to power and antenna limitations. Secondly, Starlink depends on telecom providers for access to 4G/LTE spectrum, making it reliant on existing networks. Lastly, satellite internet generally delivers slower and less reliable performance c ..

Airtel and Jio mobile users may find Starlink services more affordable than opting directly from the Elon Musk-owned satcom company, industry executives and experts have told ET. 

India's telecom regulator plans to recommend that satellite broadband spectrum be allotted for around five years to assess initial market adoption, defying Elon Musk's Starlink, which is seeking a 20-year permit, a senior government source has told Reuters.

The government has directed Starlink to establish a control centre in India, TOI reported. This move aims to enable authorities to suspend or shut down communication services in sensitive or troubled areas when necessary to maintain la ..

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/03/new-bombshell-un-report-accuses-israel-of-sexual-and-gender-based-violence-against-palestinians/ 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the report as “antisemitic” and called its findings “lies,” noting that “it is not a coincidence” that Israel withdrew a month ago from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which he also called “antisemitic.”

The findings, presented alongside public hearings in Geneva, also highlight the systematic destruction of reproductive healthcare facilities in Gaza and describe a “broader strategy to undermine Palestinian self-determination.” The report finds that Israel’s conduct has amounted to carrying out “genocidal acts” under international law, in addition to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Supriya Sule slams Bill against urban Naxalism in Maharashtra https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/maharashtra/supriya-sule-slams-bill-against-urban-naxalism-in-maharashtra/article69334253.ece  March 15, 2025  NCP(SP) MP Supriya Sule said that the Special Public Security Bill, tabled in the Assembly on July 11, 2024, undermines the very concept of “We, the People of India” 

the definition of “illegal acts” seems to grant unlimited powers to government agencies. “This effectively gives the government a license to establish a Police Raj, which could be misused against individuals, institutions, or organizations that express constructive opposition in a democratic manner. This bill undermines the very concept of “We, the People of India