By Mari Marcel Thekaekara

Politicians love the poor, who make powerful votebanks. Not so India’s 18 million street children, who do not have the vote. The many laws and conventions that cover them have little meaning. Only a few NGOs are battling for streetkids, with some like RLHP in Mysore reporting great success in educating and rehabilitating them More...

By Mari Marcel Thekaekara

Twelve dalit girls are baking bread and cakes at a Mysore café. Elsewhere in Mysore sex workers and transgenders are running their own restaurant. At La Boulangerie in Chennai, dalit youth are baking French delicacies and supplying them to 5-star hotels. These ‘tasty’ experiments are about breaking the vicious circle of oppression and making a political statement More...

By Mari Marcel Thekaekara

Street vendors are good for providing local colour in Incredible India tourist campaigns, but 10 million of them are without any rights and treated as a nuisance. Yet, this vast body of people provides invaluable services in cities and adds to a city’s earnings instead of being a drain on it. Instead of evicting them, their activities should be regularised More...

By Mari Marcel Thekaekara

In most developed countries, manhole workers are provided bunny suits and respiratory apparatus. In Hong Kong, a sewer worker needs to have 15 licences in order to enter a manhole. In India, conservancy workers – mostly from the balmiki subcaste of dalits -- go in almost naked. The mortality rate amongst them is appallingly high More...

Watching 12-year-old Rangamma pound rocks with a 2-kg hammer in a stone quarry, the statistics on child labour leap to life, says Mari Marcel Thekaekara. Anti-Slavery International estimates that roughly 1 million children do extremely dangerous work in India’s stone quarries More...

At 84 million, India has the largest number of indigenous people. Why are the adivasis still so marginalised, asks Mari Marcel Thekaekara. Why are they displaced from their lands and forests, and reduced to migrant labour? More...

By Mari Marcel Thekaekara

There are still thousands of people in India cleaning dry latrines with their bare hands, including 7 km from the capital. But there are many signs of change too: on August 15, the Safai Karmachari Andolan plans to declare Andhra Pradesh the first manual scavenging-free state in India, writes Mari Marcel Thekaekara, starting a new column on social inequities and the people who are fighting for social justice More...