Think tank launches 'India Exclusion Report'

New Delhi, Dec 4 (IANS) The Centre for Equity Studies on Tuesday released its annual report on exclusion of several sections of the society from mainstream and denial of public goods to them on the basis of their class or caste or ethnicity, otherwise ensured to every citizen by the Constitution.

"These reports assemble evidence about the success of governments in India to ensure equitable access to what we call public goods to all segments of people, especially those who are most disadvantaged...by class, caste, gender, religious identity, disability, age, ethnicity, language, education or geography," think tank Director Harsh Mander said at the launch of the report.

The report is an anthology of several articles written on issues ranging from death penalty and tea garden workers of Bengal to an analysis of dismantling of Planning Commission in the country and its replacement by the NITI Aayog.

"In terms of the broad policy direction, the NITI Aayog has not been able to make a clear distinction between the roles and responsibilities of public and private sector. It lays greater emphasis on privatisation and argues for reducing the role of government in the provisioning of essential services," Javed Alam Khan from the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability and co-author of the article said.

Satish Pandey, a Delhi University faculty and the co-author of the section on higher education, said that though there has been a massive increase in the number of people from all sections going to universities in last 15 years, the phenomenon has caused a different form of exclusion -- gender discrimination, casteism -- which takes place in the confines of such institutions of learning.

Urban homelessness and mental illness, access to banking and credit, and tribal land appropriation were among the other issues which were probed by different authors in the book.