Dear Reader,
A hundred years ago, almost to the day, on 18 March 1922, Mahatma Gandhi was sentenced to six years imprisonment under Section 124A of the Indian Penal code (IPC). A law that the Mahatma famously called the “prince among the political sections of the IPC…designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen”.
The India Forum chronicles the iconic trial and points out that it is the same sedition law that an independent India invokes to send dissenting citizens to jail today, a full century later.
The military conflict between Russia and Ukraine has rich lessons for India, including the imperative of building indigenous defence systems. Despite years of striving, India remains the largest defence importer, with a bulk of it coming from Russia.
ThePrint examines how India’s drive for being ‘aatmanirbhar’ has floundered, largely because DRDO - the premier agency in research and development of the military’s arsenal - has been beset with severe costs and time overruns, inability to develop tactical weapons and trust deficit between the organisation and the armed forces.
The police across the country use cyber forensic tools to unearth crime and criminals. However, the use of these tools are accompanied by issues of collection, storage and use of citizens’ data leading to serious privacy concerns. MediaNama deep dives into the issue and finds that the unbridled use of such surveillance is “not only unjust but dangerous”.
And, Feminism in India reports from West Bengal’s Petuapara village, in Birbhum district, on women beedi workers who toil hard, without any institutional support despite an ‘artisan card’, only to be paid measly sums - an amount that has not increased in the last 20 years!
For more such stories from the grantees, please read on.
Warmly,
Sunil Rajshekhar
IPSMF
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