New Delhi: The run up to the Bihar polls hasn’t been a “dance of democracy” and been more “like a brawl than a ballet”, The Economist notes, looking at how “India’s poorest and youngest electorate” is gearing up for the upcoming assembly polls.
While Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, 74, is “not the striking young leader he once was”, the report says that the single biggest complaint is “the lack of decent jobs”.
“Workers from Bihar can be found on factory floors across India. But they rarely get the chance to do that kind of labour in their own state, which hosts a mere 1% of the country’s factories. Around half of Bihar’s workforce toils on farms, and even in agriculture productivity lags the rest of India. Many young Biharis have given up looking for work altogether. Only about one-third of 15 to 29-year-olds are in the labour force, among the lowest rate in the country,” says the report.
However, instead of playing up questions of growth, politicians are focusing on caste, adds the report.
“Politicians on both sides of the aisle are playing up caste politics. The caste system is particularly entrenched in Bihar. Villages are still organised into caste enclaves. The upper-caste minority tend to be more educated and wealthier than everyone else. To woo each caste separately, parties have long engaged in ‘social engineering’: carefully selecting candidates according to their ability to command loyalty from specific communities, rather than because of their ideas or their performance on the stump,” says the report.
It underlines that “growth would transform lives in Bihar, more than anywhere else in India. That makes the tenor of the current campaigning all the more dispiriting”.
Assamese singer Zubeen Garg’s death has brought up a number of complex questions–many of which remain unanswered. Now, fans are asking about his discography, reports Abhishek Dey in the BBC.
“Many of Garg’s songs cannot be uploaded online without risking copyright violation owing to a lack of clarity over their ownership, which is scattered among a complicated network of producers, distributors and music labels,” it says.
“Garg’s fans got a glimpse of this complicated universe soon after his death, when many of them went searching for one of his most popular songs, Mayabini Ratir Bukut, on a popular music streaming platform, but found it missing. The song was later uploaded by a user but removed within a week due to licensing issues,” it adds.
“”There are hundreds of his songs whose ownership is either difficult to trace or remains contested,” Manas Barua, filmmaker and Garg’s friend, is quoted as saying in the report.
As climate change transforms landscapes and reconfigures economies, India’s farmers are staring at an uncertain future. In Foreign Policy, James Moules reports on the various shades of this threat.
Due to a changing climate, far more insects are making themselves known—many of which are also immune to insecticides.
“Uncertainty is rife among India’s farmers. Without proper pesticides, growing swarms of insects can ruin an entire season’s crop, while disrupted weather cycles make once predictable harvest patterns harder to forecast,” Moules writes.
As catastrophic ‘natural’ disasters become more common, farmers are being forced to seek employment elsewhere.
“Farmer P.L. Naidu, based in the small nearby town of Mangalapalem, said that more than half of the area’s farmers have left to seek employment elsewhere. He now struggles to find local farmworkers, often counting on labor from further afield to help at the busiest times of the year,” says the report, which narrows in on the “countryside” framing Andhra Pradesh’s Visakhapatnam to present the big picture.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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