Topics India
Beyond the Digital: Understanding Digital Natives with a Cause
Digital natives with a cause: the future of activism or slacktivism? Maesy Angelina argues that the debate is premature given the obscured understanding on youth digital activism and contends that an effort to understand this from the contextualized perspectives of the digital natives themselves is a crucial first step to make. This is the first out of a series of posts on her journey to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism through a research with The Blank Noise Project...
Study of Girls’ Madrasa Education in India
This study is an attempt to look at the nuances of identity formation among Indian Muslim women; notions of identity and selfhood are a result of the intersections of caste, class, religion and gender, among other factors. This paper tries to understand the process of construction of identity of Muslim women through a study of girls’ madrasas. It also attempts to examine binaries such as modernity and tradition, the secular and the religious and, nationhood and religious minority, which deb...
New project on Social Security in India
The Long Road to Social Security: Assessing and Monitoring the Implementation of Social Security for the Working Poor in India's Informal Economy is a knowledge project on social security provisions for workers in the informal sector of the economy in India. This project is a cooperation between the Amsterdam School for Social science Research, the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, India, and Hivos. The project focuses on monitoring the implementation of minimal welfare provision...
Challenging the Anti Sodomy Law in India - Arvind Narrain
The queer (1) struggle in India has had a complicated relationship with the law. Nothing exemplifies this complexity better than the vexed relationship with the anti-sodomy law in India, Sec 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Section 377 of the IPC came into force in 1860 as part of the criminal code which governs India even sixty years after independence. Sec 377 reads: ‘Unnatural offenses: Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or anima...KP “Smallholders Agency” goes Asia
After having visited Latin America and East Africa, the initiating team of “Smallholders Agency” (from Hivos, IIED and Mainumby) went to India from 1-7 February to focus on the Asian continent. The objectives were to identify Asian members for the KP’s Learning Network, to find out how the knowledge program may become embedded in India and to initiate the multi-stakeholder exploration of key topics for the knowledge programme.
State must be secular so that society can be religious
In many parts of the world religion is on an upsurge. Religious revivalism and emergent forms of fundamentalisms challenge the capacity of the state to deal with religious diversity. The Hivos-Kosmopolis conference 'Rethinking secularism' (25-26 May, Utrecht, NL) brought together academics, activists, legal experts and policy makers from various parts of the world to debate the future of secularism. Among them: Sudanese thinker and activist Abdullahi An-Na'im and Justice Aftab Alam, sitting...