Four months after its release, ‘Enjoy Enjaami’ is a global hit, entertaining and educating audiences around the world even if, in the words of the lyricist, the intention wasn’t “to comfort anyone” but to “disturb”.
Our estimates show that around 150-199 million additional people will fall into poverty this year. It means an overall increase in poverty by 15-20 per cent, making around half of the country’s population poor
Treating occupational safety for sanitation workers as a technical issue about personal protective equipment is not enough to understand the various elements involved, from changing behaviour to the larger context of sanitation workers’ lives.
A Joint Civil Society* Contribution to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) for the adoption of the List of Issues Prior to Reporting on India has regretted that despite the abolition of untouchability enshrined in the Indian Constitution, and a constitutional formal prohibition of discrimination on the ground base of race or caste, under the Constitution, Dalits and other communities affected by discrimination based on descent, including Adivasis, still face de facto discrimination.
In Pakistan, sanitation workers face dangerous and dreadful conditions everyday. Unfortunately, not much has changed for sanitation workers in the country over the last many decades. An increasing numbers of sanitation workers continue to lose their lives to poor sanitation planning and management.
Caste is not well understood in the United States, even though it plays a significant role in the lives of Americans of South Asian descent. Two recent lawsuits make caste among the South Asian diaspora much more visible.
In 2000, pregnant 19-year-old Harpreet Kaur was found dead in mysterious circumstances. Her mother, the then chief of the committee that manages Sikh places of worship across India, cited severe food poisoning as the cause. The truth was much more sinister. Kaur was murdered following her secret marriage to 21-year-old Kamaljeet Singh – a lower-caste man – against the wishes of her mother.
More than half the deaths due to Covid among the staff of the three MCDs — North, South and East — have been of safai karamcharis. Of the 94 deaths among corporation employees due to Covid, 49 are sanitation workers, as per data accessed by The Indian Express of the three MCDs.
a pregnant woman, belonging to the Dalit community, has alleged that she was sexually assaulted in front of her children after her husband, who works as a labourer, refused to chop some trees at a farm owned by the accused.
Women in India making children’s clothes for H&M have spoken out about widespread sexual violence they claim to have faced at one of the company’s suppliers in India.
The study conducted by Sustainable and Resilient Ideas Pvt Ltd (SRI) has revealed that various marginalized sections of the society have been largely affected by the pandemic.
Civil rights advocates are calling on a U.S. agency to recognize that caste discrimination is illegal under existing federal law, an issue growing more prominent as tech companies are hit with litigation by South Asian workers alleging bias based on social status.
The group, over a 100 years old, has recently come under scrutiny for casteist labor practices in New Jersey.
U.S. authorities recently raided a large and well-known Hindu temple in New Jersey that they said had exploited Dalit workers from the “lowest” bracket of India’s caste system. The men had been categorized as “lay religious workers” for immigration purposes but were instead employed in back-breaking labor for $1/hour.
FBI agents were at a large Hindu temple in New Jersey on Tuesday as a new lawsuit claimed it was built by workers from marginalized communities in India who were lured to the U.S. and forced to work long hours for just a few dollars per day.
many US companies employ Indian immigrants to work in technology and, as has only recently been revealed, casteism seems to follow them. The statistics suggest that less than 2 per cent of the Indian immigrants that make up senior executives in the US are from ‘lower’ castes.
In June, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing initiated a lawsuit against Cisco, a multibillion-dollar tech conglomerate, for caste discrimination against an engineer of Indian descent. However, the situation isn’t as straightforward as it would have been if the alleged discrimination had been based on race. Because US law does not officially recognise the old Indian caste system, technically, “casteism” cannot be an offence.