Preeti is footloose on city streets

So it turns out I love to roam and explore a city on my own. Without a friend, maybe with a camera, without a pepper spray or a pocket knife as self defense; and many times, when I feel lucky, without a map. There is a certain sense of euphoric discovery, a delicious sense of freedom I get by walking around on my own, sightseeing, people-watching, jumping into a random bus or a rickshaw and let me take it to unknown places, befriending strangers and chatting up the cab drivers about local politics and gossip. Cities are strange beasts of modernity as planners and poor people’s lives attest. The city is a major preoccupation now for many writers, and is no longer the literary prerogative of travelogue writers or travel companies.

In recent months, I have seen a new kind of vocabulary enter into the language of groups fighting slum evictions: the language of caste. For the first time, in protests against evictions and displacement in Chennai, groups working here began to call recent changes in policies towards the urban poor “the new urban untouchability.”

In this city, a number of groups have worked assiduously since the 1980s to fight against evictions of slum dwellers. These groups include NGOs, groups of slum dwellers, trade unions of low income workers, and women’s groups. For many years, they fought individual evictions, and their constant struggle resulted in Chennai having one of the best records of providing rehabilitation to evicted slum dwellers, often very close to the places where people were evicted from.

We need to realise that the protests on the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP) has been marked by the fear over the safety of the nuclear plant.

This cannot be ignored in the post-Fukushima era. The onus is on the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd., which is implementing the project, to take the public reaction/response and respect the local communities’ apprehensions, which have been trebled by the recent nuclear holocausts like conditions in Japan, post the tsunami. The powers that be at the top need to assure the country of the safety of the two Russian-made reactors, the two VVER-1000 state-of-the-art reactors installed at Kudankulam.

“Agriculture is the backbone of the Indian Economy”-said Mahatma Gandhi five decades ago. Even today, as we enter the new millennium, the situation is still the same, with almost the entire economy being sustained by agriculture, which is the mainstay of the villages. Not only the economy, but also every one of us looks to agriculture for our sustenance too.

Although agriculture contributes only 20% to 21% of India’s GDP, its importance in the country’s economic, social, and political fabric goes well beyond this indicator. The rural areas are still home to some 72 percent of the India’s 1.1 billion people, a large number of whom are poor. Most of the rural poor depend on rain-fed agriculture and fragile forests for their livelihoods.