Shows
The Nagrik PodcastDial W for Wage Theft - the India Labour Line Story: Sushovan Dhar, Sanotsh Poonia, Shreehari Paliath, Chandan KumarYellappa is among thousands of migrant workers who wait every morning at one of Bangalore's several labour stands to seek work from construction contractors. He is one of 56 million people employed in India's construction industry.
Nearly all of them are part of India's 411 million informal workers, who constitute over 90% of India’s workers. Not only do they not benefit from social security schemes such as employee state insurance and the provident fund, they are also not protected by the laws that regulate employment. Even after Independence, the large majority of Indian workers never benefited from the...
2022-10-171h 10The Nagrik PodcastAmbedkar, Labour Leader: Jesus Chairez, Sumeet Mhaskar, Prabodhan PolNovember 7, 1938, 21 years after the October Revolution and two years after he published his searing critique of Hinduism in The Annihilation of Caste, B.R. Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party called for a one-day strike against the passage of the Bombay Industrial Dispute Bill. Among its other provisions, the law would make strikes a criminal offence. More than one lakh workers are said to have participated in the strike in Bombay alone.
Earlier in the year, Ambedkar had marched at the head of 25000 small peasants, landless poor, and agricultural labourers as they demanded the abolition of the khoti sy...
2022-07-131h 22The Nagrik PodcastWaste Pickers Organising in Neoliberalism: Lakshmi Narayan, Poornima Chikarmane, Jane Barrett, Melanie SamsonThe Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (or KKPKP) is a membership-based trade union of waste pickers and itinerant waste buyers in Pune in Maharashtra. Formed in 1993, it wanted to assert waste pickers’ status as workers and their role in the city’s solid waste management. Today, it has over 9000 members, 80 percent of whom are women from socially backward and marginalised castes. Each member pays an annual fee to the organization and an equal amount towards their life insurance cover.
In 2005, KKPKP formed a wholly-owned workers’ cooperative called SWaCH in partnership with the Pune Municipal Corporation. 1500 waste p...
2022-03-312h 18The Nagrik PodcastForests of the People: Purnima Upadhyay, Kesav Gurnule, Mittali Sethi, Sharad Lele, Vandana Dhoop2021 marked 15 years of the Forest Rights Act and its most transformative provisions - those related to community forest rights and their governance through village gram sabhas. Along with the PESA in 1996, the FRA carved out spaces in the law for community participation in the management and governance of forests. These laws were the results of more than a century of social movements in various parts of India that cried out against the injustice of treating forest dwelling communities as encroachers on their lands, an injustice that persisted even after the constitution of independent India promised special protections for adivasis...
2022-01-151h 42The Nagrik PodcastLawyering for Citizenship: Aman WadudIn September earlier this year, many of us received a video depicting the violent murder of 33-year-old Moinul Haque during an eviction drive in the Darrang district of Assam. Many of us who saw the video were forced to reflect on what could make a man hate a stranger enough to act with such shocking violence. For some others, it was the nonchalance of some uniformed participants in the violence that struck home. The video became another landmark in a long history of ethnic contestation over land in Assam, which shares a 163-mile border with Bangladesh. Over the years...
2021-12-031h 34The Nagrik PodcastLabour Organising in Tech - II (IT sector): Devika Narayan, Jai Vipra, Alagunambi Welkin, Vineeth Chandran, Tech Workers CoalitionFor several years now, we have all tuned in to a global conversation on the power of technology firms, that included often intersecting themes such as privacy and surveillance; electoral manipulation and democratic backsliding; the sourcing practices of hardware firms; misinformation, hate speech, and censorship; algorithmic bias and the frightening capabilities of machine learning and artificial intelligence; ownership structures and monopolies; and exploitative labour practices in gig and platform work. In India, we spoke about privacy and digital exclusion when the government forced through the implementation of Aadhaar, its biometric-identification system, about network neutrality when Facebook introduced its limited...
2021-09-171h 57The Nagrik PodcastLabour Organising in Tech - I (Gig and Platform Work): Shaik Salauddin, Vinay Sarathy, Sadhana Sanjay, Aditi Surie, Ayush RathiIn August and September of 2020, delivery executives of Swiggy struck work in many Indian cities. They wanted to draw attention to the fact that in spite of the Covid 19 pandemic and the steep increase in petrol prices, Swiggy had reduced what was known as the base component of the remuneration paid to the executives from Rs. 35 to Rs. 15. Images of Swiggy executives kneeling down on the streets of Hyderabad were carried by several media outlets.
In March of 2021, the Telangana State Taxi and Drivers Joint Action Committee announced that 35000 taxis participated in a Black Flag Cab March...
2021-07-211h 56The Nagrik PodcastThe Campaign for HIV-AIDS medicines: Achal Prabhala, Anand Grover, David Legge, Ellen t'Hoen, Fatima Hassan, James Love, and Leigh HaynesVaccinating a significant part of the world's population is widely accepted as the most effective strategy to emerge quickly from the Coronavirus pandemic that we find ourselves in. As of May 20, 2021 however, only 3% of India's population has received both doses of any of the three vaccines that are currently available in the country. On average, only one in every 1000 Indians receives a vaccine dose each day.
India is not the only country that has struggled to vaccinate its population against the Coronavirus. 25% of the population in high income countries has been vaccinated compared to only 0.2% in low i...
2021-05-264h 10The Nagrik PodcastThe Global Boycott of South African Sports: Sam Ramsamy, Abdul S Minty, John Minto, Bruce Kidd, Sean Jacobs, Doug BoothFrom 1948 until the early 1990s, South Africa pursued a system of institutionalised racial segregation known as apartheid. It ensured that South Africa was dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation's minority white population. According to this system of social stratification, the Afrikaaner-speaking white citizens had the highest status, followed by Asians and Coloureds, and then black Africans.
Sport was also segregated along similar lines. Black Africans, Asians, and coloured people participated in sporting environments that were separate and inferior to those in which white athletes participated. Non-white athletes could never participate at a high le...
2021-04-082h 36The Nagrik PodcastThe Campaign for ILO Convention 177: Renana Jhabvala, Martha Chen, Eileen Boris, Marlese von Broembsen, Dev NathanIndia’s garment sector employs at least 12 million people in factories, but millions more work from their homes. Most of them are women and girls from minority or marginalised communities and the garment sector is not alone in using the labour of home-based workers.
Four out of five Indian women of the working age are neither working, nor seeking employment. The paid work that is available to India's time-poor women is often precarious and exploitative, and falls within the category known as informal work.
Home-based work falls in this category and it is marked by ve...
2021-02-162h 05The Nagrik PodcastThe Mahad Satyagraha: Subodh More, Anupama Rao, Ramesh Kamble, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Rohit DeThe Mahad satyagraha was a landmark event in the history of human rights struggles and in particular, for the struggles of India’s oppressed castes for civic rights. At least in its immediate context, the Mahad satyagraha was about Dalits making a claim to the water in the Chaudar tank of Mahad, a village in the Raigarh district of Maharashtra.
The story as it is told often begins with a resolution moved by Sitaram Keshav Bole in the Bombay legislative council in 1923. His proposal to allow Dalits to access all public water facilities in the province of Bo...
2020-12-252h 25The Nagrik PodcastSupply Chain Laws: Karuppuswamy, Rakesh Supkar, Friedel Hutz-Adams, Michael Fütterer, Christian Schliemann, Justin NolanSwitzerland and Germany are considering binding laws for corporations to meet human rights standards in their overseas supply chains.
Cotton farms, spinning and weaving factories, and garment manufacturing factories are all part of the same supply chain for garments. Human rights violations have been documented all along it. For example, in 2011, reports emerged of the Sumangali scheme, a system of exploitative employment of young women in the spinning and garment factories of western Tamil Nadu. These factories supplied garments to major western brands that were sold in stores all around the globe.
The multinational corporations...
2020-11-301h 57The Nagrik PodcastThe Struggle for Niyamgiri: Prafulla Samantara, R Shreedhar, Nitin Sethi, Madhuri Karak, Shomona Khanna, Sharad LeleEven in a career in public life that has already spanned five decades, the date of April 18, 2013, holds special significance for Prafulla Samantara. On that day, three judges of the Supreme Court said that the Union government's permission for a mining project in the Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha, a mandatory requirement under Indian federal law, could only be given after taking the consent of the gram sabhas, or the village councils, of the region. Ten years before that, Vedanta Alumina Ltd. (VAL), a subsidiary of the UK-based Vedanta Resources, had applied to the Union government's Ministry of Environment and...
2020-10-171h 49The Nagrik PodcastThe Chipko Movement: Haripriya Rangan, Sharachchandra Lele, Sunandita Mehrotra, Sunderlal BahugunaIn the late 1960s, the 70s and the 80s, photographs of tribal and forest-dwelling women of the Garhwal Himalayas, encircling and hugging trees to prevent their planned felling, went around the world, influencing conservation movements everywhere.
Sudesha Devi was among the leaders of this movement. A young woman, married and with children, she stepped beyond her daily routine of hard physical labour and broke stifling social conventions to become a leader. In Uttarakhand's agrarian economy, women were the most directly affected by environmental degradation and deforestation. The Chipko movement was propelled forward by ordinary women like Sudesha. As...
2020-09-081h 16The Nagrik PodcastJustice after large-scale violence: Gagan Sethi, Akram Akhtar Choudhary, Mishika SinghMishika Singh is a Delhi-based lawyer, one of many who responded to calls for legal assistance following the riots of February 2020. 53 people, official figures say, lost their lives. In nearly all cases where violence was targeted at Muslims, the police remained mute spectators, even when it led to death.
What is the role of the public-spirited lawyer after large scale violence is directed at a community? History shows us two intertwining paths. The first is to fix responsibility on the perpetrators of the violence through the criminal legal system. The objective then is to ensure that those...
2020-08-101h 53The Nagrik PodcastThe Warli Revolt: Indra Munshi, Archana Prasad, MC Mawali, Prakash BhoirIn October 2019, the most recent conflict over Mumbai's Aarey colony came into national prominence when the city's municipal corporation took advantage of a Bombay High Court order confirming that the area did not fall into the legal category of a forest, to fell trees and clear the area for the construction of a car shed for the city's metro rail.
For many years, this area has been a site of conflict between the city's need to expand and urbanise further, the environmentalists who value Aarey's biodiversity and green cover, and the people who inhabit its 12 villages, including t...
2020-06-231h 29The Nagrik PodcastRunning a grassroots lawyer network: Nupur SinhaWe learn from Nupur Sinha, the Executive Director of the Centre for Social Justice (“CSJ”), about the work that goes into using the justice system to fight for the rights of marginalised people, through a network of grassroots lawyers and paralegals. Nupur and the team at CSJ have nurtured this network to provide legal support in several communities, through riots, natural disasters, and even the current pandemic, and also to make systemic interventions through the justice system in relation many problems such as securing the rights and entitlements of adivasis and stopping violence against women.
Who are thes...
2020-05-231h 01The Nagrik PodcastA life in legal literacy: Abha Singhal JoshiOn the first episode of the Nagrik Podcast, we learn from Abha Singhal Joshi, whose career is a slice of the recent history of legal literacy programmes in India. Over two calls, she spoke to Nagrik Learning's Aju John about her start in life as a litigator in Delhi and her route to legal literacy programmes via legal journalism.
The conversation covers a lot of ground, including details of her work with the Multiple Action Research Group to deliver legal literacy to the poor and marginalised through the production of learning materials on various aspects of the...
2020-05-112h 02