Maharashtra

In yet another incident that gives the lie to laudable pieces of legislation like the Land Ceiling Act 1961, and to other constitutional provisions that extend protection to weaker sections, several landless adivasis in two tehsils of Ahmadnagar district were evicted from land they had cultivated for some years now.

Maharashtra evidently does not need its heroes. The birth centenary of Gopal Mukund Huddar has come and gone with scarcely anyone remembering him. From being a 'sarkaryawaha' of the RSS, Huddar went on to fight in the Spanish civil war and join the Communist Party of India. He ended up being not entirely acceptable to both the worlds he traversed. But that does not matter in the final analysis. In our dismal and post-ideological times the memory of somebody like Huddar can keep the principle of hope alive.

The right to information has been legitimised in Maharashtra for over three years but suffers from numerous exemptions and exceptions. There appears to be an attempt to privatise the concerned departments to put them out of reach of the information law in order to protect widespread corruption.

A look at the poor status of healthcare for urban slums in Maharashtra, and the differences between rural and urban areas of the state in terms of delivery of healthcare services.

A play was staged in this year's Ganesh festival in Delhi. The speaker of the Lok Sabha seemed to have liked it. Soon after the play was done in Mumbai. The current culture expert in the capital city of the Marathas, Uddhav Thackeray, did not like it. He wondered how such a play could have been performed in the festival. The episode is yet another example of a phenomenon of Maharashtra's cultural life - that of extragovernmental censorship, much more damaging than governmental censorship.