The Nagrik Podcast

2021 marked 15 years of the Forest Rights Act and its most transformative provisions - those related to community forest rights and their governance through village gram sabhas. Along with the PESA in 1996, the FRA carved out spaces in the law for community participation in the management and governance of forests. These laws were the results of more than a century of social movements in various parts of India that cried out against the injustice of treating forest dwelling communities as encroachers on their lands, an injustice that persisted even after the constitution of independent India promised special protections for adivasis and scheduled tribes.   For over a century, the Indian state's legal control of forests had extinguished the traditional rights of forest-dwelling communities, who came to be perceived as illegal occupants or encroachers of government forests.   Things changed dramatically in 2006, when the Forest Rights Act recognized and vested a set of forest rights in the scheduled tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have been residing in forests for generations but whose rights had not been recorded. Most radically perhaps, the law recognized their rights as communities of ownership of minor forest produce that has been traditionally collected within or outside village boundaries, and the rights of access to collect, use, and dispose of this produce.    Minor forest produce includes all non-timber forest produce of plant origin including bamboo, honey, wax, tendu or kendu leaves, medicinal plants and herbs, roots, and tubers.    Apart from recognising and vesting these rights, the Forest Rights Act also set up democratic procedures for decision-making at the level of settlements.   Like any paradigm shifting project of decolonisation or for the de-centralisation of power, fears are expressed about whether the newly empowered people are actually ready for the responsibilities of power.    This episode of the Nagrik podcast reflects not only on the economic and ecological impact of the community-led management of forest resources, but also on grassroot-level democratic practices in relation to the governance of forests.    The Nagrik Podcast is among the world's best civic engagement podcasts.   You can listen to:   Purnima Upadhyay, who runs Khoj, a civil society organisation that works in the region of Melghat in the Amaravati district of Maharashtra, on the promotion of the effective use of community forest rights under the Forest Rights Act; Kesav Gurnule, who works with Shrishti, a civil society organisation that works in the Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, on the promotion of the effective use of community forest rights under the Forest Rights Act; Mittali Sethi, a former Project Officer with the Tribal Development Department of the government of Maharashtra, in Dharni and Melghat, an IAS officer of the 2017 batch, and currently the Chief Executive Officer of the Chandrapur Zilla Parishad; Vandana Dhoop, an independent researcher, whose work has covered Nayagarh's women-led Forest Protection Committees; and Sharad Lele, a Senior Fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment   Further reading:   Mittali Sethi, “How 2 Landmark Laws Can Come Together To Make India’s Forest Communities Secure”, Article 14 Geetanjoy Sahu, “Experiences in the Vidarbha Region of Maharashtra Implementation of Community Forest Rights”, Economic and Political Weekly Sharachchandra Lele, Shruti Mokashi , “Mapping the potential of Community Forest Resource Rights in central India”, Mongabay Shreya Dasgupta, "Does community-based forest management work in the tropics?", Mongabay Lekshmi M, Anup Kumar Samal, Geetanjoy Sahu, “15 Years of FRA: What Trends in Forest Rights Claims and Recognition Tell Us”, The Wire Madhusudan Bandi, “Looking beyond the Forest Rights Act”, The Hindu Vandana Dhoop, “In Nayagarh, India, community women get long-due recognition for protecting their forests”, Rights+Resources

In September earlier this year, many of us received a video depicting the violent murder of 33-year-old Moinul Haque during an eviction drive in the Darrang district of Assam. Many of us who saw the video were forced to reflect on what could make a man hate a stranger enough to act with such shocking violence. For some others, it was the nonchalance of some uniformed participants in the violence that struck home. The video became another landmark in a long history of ethnic contestation over land in Assam, which shares a 163-mile border with Bangladesh. Over the years, as the region went through several tumults, including the partition of Bengal in 1905, the partion of India in 1947, and the genocide in East Pakistan followed by the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the narrative took root that “indigenous” Assamese were losing their land to “migrants from Bangladesh”. It became the political foundation for the Assam movement during the early 1980s, the creation of a legal procedure to detect illegal immigrants and expel them from the state of Assam, and later, the creation of a National Register of Citizens for Assam, associated tribunals with the power to determine the validity of a person's citizenship, and detention centres to hold the people who failed these tests. The BJP came to power in the state in 2016 and intensified efforts to weed out so-called illegal immigrants. These efforts have disproportionately affected Muslims. According to government data, nearly 87,000 people were declared foreigners in Assam between 2015 and 2020. As of April of 2021, 1,36,173 cases were pending in the Foreigners Tribunals.   This is the background in which Aman Wadud practices law. In many parts of the world, the people who most urgently need legal services are not able to access them. The people whose citizenship has been questioned in the Foreigners Tribunals of Assam are among them and Aman Wadud, as a lawyer and co-founder of the Justice and Liberty Initiative, provides these services pro bono or free of charge.    Further reading:   Rohini Mohan, “‘Worse than a death sentence’: Inside Assam’s sham trials that could strip millions of citizenship”, Vice News (July 29, 2019) Siddhartha Deb, “How India disenfranchises Muslims”, The New York Times (September 15, 2021) “Prove your Grandfather is Indian: Ground Reportage on NRC”, Bangalore International Centre on YouTube (November 20, 2019) Jagat Sohail and Apoorv Avram, "'Invaders', 'Terrorists' and Now, 'Illegal Immigrants': Hindutva’s Reframing of Exclusion", The Wire (February 7, 2020) Rahul Karmakar, “When you can’t find foreigners, you manufacture them: Human rights lawyer Aman Wadud”, The Hindu (June 27, 2020)  

For several years now, we have all tuned in to a global conversation on the power of technology firms, that included often intersecting themes such as privacy and surveillance; electoral manipulation and democratic backsliding; the sourcing practices of hardware firms; misinformation, hate speech, and censorship; algorithmic bias and the frightening capabilities of machine learning and artificial intelligence; ownership structures and monopolies; and exploitative labour practices in gig and platform work. In India, we spoke about privacy and digital exclusion when the government forced through the implementation of Aadhaar, its biometric-identification system, about network neutrality when Facebook introduced its limited version of the Internet, about the foreign ownership of software products during border skirmishes with China, about waves of anti-minority hate speech coursing through social networks, about the state's surveillance of political opponents and human rights defenders using military-grade technology, and about the widening digital divide when the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic forced schools to adopt online learning technology.   This episode of the Nagrik podcast is the second and final part of a series on labour organising in technology. In the last episode, we learnt about how mostly blue-collar workers were demanding better conditions in gig and platform work. Circumstances are markedly different in India's IT sector, where employment remains highly sought after. In this episode, we will learn about how these white collar workers are organsing, and for what.    The increased public scrutiny of the technology industry around the world coincided with the sheen coming off India's information technology sector. After 2015, stagnant wages and the long hours of work made it a less attractive employer, a trend that continued into the difficult months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The increased precarity of work in the IT sector became the cause for and the focus of, its workers coming together.   Conditions of work in the IT sector have perhaps worsened during the periods of working from home forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Organisers have reported more intense surveillance of workers and increased hours of work.   Some of the organisers that we spoke to, articulated a particular view of the role that workers unions have to play in charting the course of the technology industry towards more justice and fairness in technology. The Kerala-based Pratidhwani however, is very different. To begin with, tt categorically does not see itself as a workers' union.   While Pratidhwani organised around cultural activity to be able to better advocate for the interests of IT employees, the other organisations that clearly identified themselves as workers unions, provided legal support during times of employment uncertainty.    To understand the methods and objectives of these groups, and to learn about their challenges and successes, we spoke to:   - Jaai Vipra of AIITEU, the All India IT & ITeS Employees' Union - Alagunambi Welkin of UNITE, the Union of IT and IES Employees - Vineeth Chandran of Pratidhwani - a founding member of the Bangalore chapter of the Tech Workers’ Coalition (who did not want to be named), and - Devika Narayan, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Said Business School in the University of Oxford   More reading   - Rashmi Menon, “Even India’s tech workers are interested in employee unions”, The Mint (January 8, 2021) - Prudhviraj Rupavath, “Accenture may layoff 10,000 employees as unions campaign against illegal labour practices in IT sector”, Newsclick (August 28, 2020) - “IT employees union UNITE warns firms on workforce reduction”, The Hindu, (November 6, 2019) - Swarnami Mondal, “Verizon Data Services Sacks 1200 Staff Across India, Employee Alleges Bouncers Used To Intimidate Them Into Forceful Resignation”, The Logical Indian (December 15, 2017) - “Dumped by L&T Infotech, students in ‘no jobs’ land”, BusinessLine, (January 20, 2018) - David Streitfeld, “How Amazon crushes unions”, The New York Times, (March 16, 2021) - Gerrit De Vynck et al, “Six things to know about the latest efforts to bring unions to Big Tech”, The Washington Post (April 30, 2021) - Matt O' Brien, “Google workers form new labor union, a tech industry rarity”, AP News (January 4, 2021) - Moira Warburton, “'Amazon won't change without a union”: Canadian warehouse files for union vote”, The Star, (September 14, 2021) - “Technopark, India's first & largest IT park, celebrates 30th anniversary”, OnManorama (July 30, 2020) - “Prathidhwani organises virtual job fair for IT sector in Kerala”, Deccan Herald (September 17, 2021) - “Techies beautify walls of government school in Karyavattom”, The New Indian Express (July 21, 2021) - All India IT and ITeS Employees’ Union - Union of IT and ITeS Employees - Tech Workers Coalition - Prathidhwani

In August and September of 2020, delivery executives of Swiggy struck work in many Indian cities. They wanted to draw attention to the fact that in spite of the Covid 19 pandemic and the steep increase in petrol prices, Swiggy had reduced what was known as the base component of the remuneration paid to the executives from Rs. 35 to Rs. 15. Images of Swiggy executives kneeling down on the streets of Hyderabad were carried by several media outlets. In March of 2021, the Telangana State Taxi and Drivers Joint Action Committee announced that 35000 taxis participated in a Black Flag Cab March, a symbolic protest where taxis offered their services with black flags to highlight the fact that even amidst rising fuel prices, the app-based cab aggregators Uber and Ola had not increased the base rates for drivers. In May, the United Food Delivery Partners Union held an online protest that urged the state government for a financial relief package, vaccination on priority, and the provision of masks, sanitisers, and face shields.  A significant majority of work in India is performed through informal forms of employment. The emergence of the gig or platform economy during the past decade has transformed this world of work in many sectors. Most visibly, location-based apps have transformed how people access location-specific work such driving, delivery, domestic work, and beauty services. Another category of work, known as cloud work, refers to short-duration jobs that could be performed from anywhere with an internet connection. The claim made on behalf of technology platforms that have mediated work during the last decade is that they would increase transparency and as a result, wages and working conditions. Another claim is that they allow women, persons with disabilities, young people and others who are marginalized in traditional labour markets to access work.  An issue at the centre of the global conversation on the gig and platform economy however is how platforms have avoided any obligations under labour laws. As a result of the characterisation of the workers who perform services using these platforms on a daily basis as entrepreneurs or freelancers instead of as employees, platforms are able to shift much of the risk of business to these workers.  Platforms however, have claimed that people are able to access through them, work that is better than what would otherwise be available to them, under less rigid arrangements.  In this episode of the Nagrik podcast, we learn from a group of experts about measuring the quality of gig and platform work and the challenges facing gig and platform workers who want to organise and negotiate for better work. We learn from: Shaik Saluddin, the Hyderabad-based National General Secretary of the Indian Federation of App Based Transport Workers Vinay Sarathy, the Bengaluru-based President of the United Food Delivery Partners Union Sadhana Sanjay, Research Assistant at the Bengaluru-based NGO, IT for Change Aditi Surie, sociologist and consultant with the Indian Institute of Human Settlements Ayush Rathi, Senior Researcher, at the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society   Additional information: Amay Korjan and Vinay Narayan,  "Socializing Data Value - Reflections on the State of Play", IT for Change, July 2021 Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon, "Platforms, Power, and Politics - Perspectives from Domestic and Care Work in India", June 2021 "Future of Labour Post Covid-19: Part 1", Suno India Aditi Surie, "Are Ola and Uber Drivers Entrepreneurs or Exploited Workers?", EPW Engage, June 2018 The Hindu, "Food delivery workers seek COVID-19 relief package", May 30, 2021 The Wire, "Swiggy Delivery Executives Strike in Chennai and Hyderabad Over Reduction in Payment", August 19, 2020 Soumya Chatterjee, "Food delivery executives protest in Bengaluru, demand compensation for loss of work", The News Minute, June 4, 2020Shilpa S Ranipeta, "12 days after strike began, Swiggy continues talks with delivery execs in Hyderabad", The News Minute, September 26, 2020

Vaccinating a significant part of the world's population is widely accepted as the most effective strategy to emerge quickly from the Coronavirus pandemic that we find ourselves in. As of May 20, 2021 however, only 3% of India's population has received both doses of any of the three vaccines that are currently available in the country. On average, only one in every 1000 Indians receives a vaccine dose each day.  India is not the only country that has struggled to vaccinate its population against the Coronavirus. 25% of the population in high income countries has been vaccinated compared to only 0.2% in low income countries. The WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom referred to these inequities in access to the vaccine as “a catastrophic moral failure”. The current themes of pharmaceutical monopolies and affordable access to health remind us of the global struggle to make anti-retroviral therapy available to people living with HIV-AIDS at a time when the continent of Africa was being ravaged by that disease. That campaign for equitable access to life-saving medicines, with the South African Treatment Action Campaign at its visible core, took place just as the WTO and the TRIPS Agreement had come into existence.  What the AIDS epidemic and the campaign for life-saving medicines helped the world understand better was that the true vector of disease was inequality. The HIV virus disproportionately killed the world's poor and the marginalised. Covid vaccines can be made available for all people, in all countries, and at speed but only if there is a fundamental transformation in how we currently manufacture and distribute medicines, but it has been done before.  In this episode of the Nagrik Podcast, we learn from a group of activists and scholars who worked on ensuring access to life saving medicines twenty years ago during the HIV-AIDS crisis, and some who today, are working for the equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines. We hear from:   Achal Prabhala, an activist for access to medicines, whose work spans India, Brazil, and South Africa through the accessibsa project Anand Grover, a Senior Advocate in India and a founder-member of the Lawyers Collective, who was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health David Legge, a scholar emeritus in the School of Public Health and Human Biosciences at La Trobe University in Melbourne, is part of the Peoples' Health Movement Ellen t'Hoen, a lawyer and public health advocate, was the director for policy and advocacy at Médecins Sans Frontières’ campaign for access to medical treatment Fatima Hassan, social justice activist and human rights lawyer, is the founder and director of the Health Justice Initiative James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International  Leigh Haynes, a lawyer and health equity expert, who is part of the Free The Vaccine campaign Additional information: Hannah Ellis-Petersen et. al., “Stench of death pervades rural India as Ganges swells with Covid victims”, The Guardian (2021) Alia Chughtai, "Did India get its COVID vaccine strategy wrong?", Al Jazeera (2021)  WHO COVID-19 Technology Access Pool  Ellen t'Hoen, “The global politics of pharmaceutical monopoly power”, Open Society Foundations (2009) Christopher Butler, “Human Rights and the World Trade Organization - the right to essential medicines and the TRIPS Agreement”, 5 J. INT’L L. & POL’Y 5:1 (2007) “The Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health - Ten Years Later: The State of Implementation”, Policy Brief 7, (South Centre: 2011) Joseph E Stiglitz et. al., “Patents vs. the Pandemic”, Project Syndicate  Achal Prabhala et. al., “We can't let the WTO get in the way of a 'people's vaccine'”, The Guardian  Ellen t'Hoen, “Covid shows the world it needs new rules to deal with pandemics”  Achal Prabhala et. al., “The world's poorest countries are at India's mercy for vaccines. It's unsustainable”, The Guardian (2021)  “OPEN LETTER: Uniting Behind A People’s Vaccine Against COVID-19”, Oxfam International   "No profit on pandemic - European Union Citizens' Initiative"  Susan George et. al., “Taking Health back from Corporations: Pandemics, big pharma and privatized health”, TNI Long Reads,  Zachie Achmat, “How to beat the epidemic”, The Guardian (2001),  “A Timeline of HIV and AIDS”, HIV.gov  Katherine Eban, “How an Indian tycoon fought Big Pharma to sell AIDS drugs for $1 a day”  Sarah Boseley, “How Nelson Mandela changed the Aids agenda in South Africa”, The Guardian (2013) Peoples’ Health Movement, “Peoples’ Charter for Health”

From 1948 until the early 1990s, South Africa pursued a system of institutionalised racial segregation known as apartheid. It ensured that South Africa was dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation's minority white population. According to this system of social stratification, the Afrikaaner-speaking white citizens had the highest status, followed by Asians and Coloureds, and then black Africans.    Sport was also segregated along similar lines. Black Africans, Asians, and coloured people participated in sporting environments that were separate and inferior to those in which white athletes participated. Non-white athletes could never participate at a high level of competition, or represent their country at international events.   From the 1950s, sport, with its myths of level playing fields and cross-cultural exchange, became one of the nodal points of anti-apartheid activism in South Africa and around the world. In 1958, Dennis Brutus, a vocal critic of apartheid, co-founded the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SAN-ROC). In the years that followed, SAN-ROC was the coordinating centre of an international movement to isolate South Africa in international sport.   In this episode of the Nagrik Podcast, we try to learn how a small group of people were able to lead a campaign of such global influence, and explore the lasting impact of the sporting boycott.   We hear from:   Sam Ramsamy, Brutus' successor at SANROC, who from the mid-1970s, went about constructing and protecting, along with his colleagues, an international boycott against South African sport.   Abdul Samad Minty, who represented SANROC at the meeting of the International Olympic Committee at Baden Baden, to persuade its delegates to exclude South Africa from the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.    Douglas Booth, the dean of the School of Education, Sport, and Exercise Sciences at the University of Otago. His work primarily focuses on the political and cultural aspects of sport and in the mid-1980s, while at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, Booth started his work on the sports boycott of South Africa.   Sean Jacobs, an associate professor of international affairs at The New School in New York. He is founder and editor of Africa is a Country, and in 2019, published his book, Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization.   John Minto, who led Halt All Racist Tours or HART, which was formed in New Zealand to protest against rugby tours to and from Apartheid South Africa.  Bruce Kidd, a Canadian campaigner for the preservation of the boycott, who had won medals at the 1962 Commonwealth Games.   Further reading   ES Reddy, “A tribute to Sam Ramsamy and others who fought apartheid sport”, South African History Online   “1976 - African countries boycott the Olympics”, BBC - On This Day   “The D’Oliveira Affair”, BBC - Sporting Witness   Mike Rowbottom, “Ramsamy, the man Mandela called his son, reflects at 80 on SANROC, the IOC and his “greatest moment” at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics”, Inside The Games   Tom Hunt, "Trevor Richards: 50 years on from Halt All Racists Tour and the power of protest", Stuff   “1981 Springbok Tour”, New Zealand History   "Rebel Rebel", BBC - The Documentary Podcast   Venu Madhav Govindu, “India’s gift to the struggle against apartheid”, The India Forum

India’s garment sector employs at least 12 million people in factories, but millions more work from their homes. Most of them are women and girls from minority or marginalised communities and the garment sector is not alone in using the labour of home-based workers. Four out of five Indian women of the working age are neither working, nor seeking employment. The paid work that is available to India's time-poor women is often precarious and exploitative, and falls within the category known as informal work. Home-based work falls in this category and it is marked by very little remuneration, irregular incomes, unregulated hours of work, no social security, and poor conditions of health. Like other types of informal work, there is no formal relationship of employment with a single identifiable employer and workers have little or no legal protection. Trade unions, which had originally emerged to represent the interests of men working formal jobs, often failed to recognise these special barriers that informal workers (and women in particular) faced, and were in many cases, unable to adequately represent their interests. In law too, most labour protections are only available to formal workers who earn wages. There are hardly any laws that protect the wages of informal workers or the piece rates that are paid to home workers. This was true of the ILO's international standards as well. That was the case at least, until 1996, when the International Labour Organization adopted Convention 177, an international convention on home workers. Under Convention 177, ratifying states are obliged to formulate, adopt and implement a national policy on home work, aimed at improving the conditions of home workers. Such a policy had to promote the equality of treatment between home workers and other workers in relation to their collective bargaining rights, wages, health and safety, social security, maternity benefits, and so on. The states also commit to implement such a policy through laws. The story of how this convention came to be, is one of remarkable civic action that resulted in an international network that campaigned for votes at the international labour conference in Geneva. 61% of the world's workers earn their living in the informal economy. In South Asia, over 80 per cent of women in non-agricultural jobs are in informal employment. Along with the ILO Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (known as Recommendation 202), the Home Work Convention may be seen as a pillar of the international strategy to make visible, the undervalued work in the informal economy. While it remains a powerful tool in the hands of groups of informal workers, the networks and institutions that emerged from the campaign for Convention 177, are perhaps just as important as the convention itself. Today, membership-based organisations of home-based workers are more formally networked through the Homenet networks. WIEGO, or Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising, which emerged through an urgent need felt during the campaign for a better understanding of informal workers in policy spaces, is today the premier organisation working to increase the voice and visibility of the working poor, especially women.     Such networks and institutions offer informal sector workers a strong alternative to federations of traditional labour unions. In this episode of the Nagrik Podcast, you will receive an insight into the work that went into the adoption of these standards, and the networks and associations of informal workers that emerged from that campaign. This episode features interviews with: -  Renana Jhabvala the national co-ordinator of SEWA, the Self-Employed Womens' Association of India - Martha Chen, a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, an Affiliated Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and one of the founders of WIEGO, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing - Marlese von Broembsen, the Director of WIEGO's Law Programme - Eileen Boris, a professor at the Department of Feminist Studies in University of California Santa Barbara and the author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019 - Dev Nathan, a professor at the Instutite for Human Development   Additional Material C 177 – Home Work Convention, 1996 R202 - Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 R204 - Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy Recommendation, 2015 Kathmandu Declaration for the rights of South Asian home-based workers SEWA, the Self-Employed Womens’ Association of India Support Informal Workers, Reduce Poverty – the WIEGO manifesto Homenet International, Homenet South Asia WIEGO WIEGO, “Informal Workers in India: A Statistical Profile” Homenet South Asia, “Impact of Covid-19 on women home-based workers in South Asia” Homenet South Asia, “Working in Garment Supply Chains: A Homeworker’s Toolkit” Homenet South Asia, “Empowering Home-based Workers in India: Strategies and Solutions” Eileen Boris, (OUP: 2019), Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019 Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast, “Eileen Boris on the Construct of the Woman Worker” UN Forum on Business and Human Rights, “Informality: How to Approach the Elephant in the Room” Shiney Chakraborty, The Wire, “Women Informal Workers: Falling Through the Cracks in the Pandemic”

The Mahad satyagraha was a landmark event in the history of human rights struggles and in particular, for the struggles of India’s oppressed castes for civic rights. At least in its immediate context, the Mahad satyagraha was about Dalits making a claim to the water in the Chaudar tank of Mahad, a village in the Raigarh district of Maharashtra. The story as it is told often begins with a resolution moved by Sitaram Keshav Bole in the Bombay legislative council in 1923. His proposal to allow Dalits to access all public water facilities in the province of Bombay, was passed.  These seeds fell on very fertile ground. The region of coastal Maharashtra and the Raigarh district in particular, already had a history of anti-caste ideas.  This is evident from the childhood and early life of one of the key personalities through whom we can approach the Mahad satyagraha - RB More, one of its main organisers and a founder of the Mahar Samaj Sewa Sangh. In 1926, the SK Bole resolution of 1923 was affirmed by the Mahad municipality. It decided to throw open the Chowdar Tank to the Dalits. But, to quote from Dhananjay Keer’s biography of Ambedkar, "However, the resolution of the municipality remained a mere gesture in that the Untouchables had not exercised their right owing to the hostility of the caste Hindus."     By the mid-1920s, BR Ambedkar, who had returned to India following his studies, had already made very public arguments for the creation of separate electorates for oppressed minority communities. In March 1924, he convened the meeting that established the Bahishkrit Hitkarni Sabha with the motto, "Educate, Agitate and Organise".  Thousands of people from across Maharashtra and Gujarat arrived in Mahad for the conference on March 19, 1927. Among other matters, the Conference, which came to be known as the first Mahad conference, appealed to the government to make the SK Bole resolution a reality, if necessary, by providing a protective legal environment for its enforcement. At the tank, Ambedkar took water, followed, in defiance of the oppressive caste system, by a large number of people. Two hours later, there was violent reprisal from the upper caste Hindus of Mahad. Many Dalits sought shelter in the homes of Muslims. Several days later, the orthodox Hindus of Mahad conducted a purification ceremony at the tank and declared the water once again fit for consumption by the upper castes. The question of Dalit access to water was discussed all across Maharashtra and a decision was taken to have a second conference at Mahad in December. Around this time, the upper caste Hindus of Mahad filed a suit to declare the tank as private property. In the courts, Ambedkar was enthusiastic about using the Mahad case to set a precedent on the question of access to public resources and public spaces. At Mahad on the morning of December 24, the District Magistrate asked Ambedkar to postpone the satyagraha but Ambedkar wanted to at least address the conference. During the speech, he said, "This Conference has been called to inaugurate an era of equality in this land" and drew parallels with the French revolution. That night, a copy of the Manusmriti was placed on a pyre and burnt. RB More came to be known as Comrade RB More, and was a senior Indian communist leader at the time of his death in 1972. His life almost represents a bridge between the Marxist and Ambedkarite politics of Maharashtra. In this episode of the Nagrik Podcast, we will learn about the political space from which the Mahad satyagraha emerged, and the organisational work of BR Ambedkar, RB More, and their colleagues through the Bahishkrit Hitkarini Sabha, the Mahad Samaj Sewa Sangh, and their several publications, and also the legal and political strategies that Ambedkar pursued during this time.  To help us understand the colonial state's mediation of conflicting claims and the role of anti-caste thought in the making of Dalit claims to public resources and public spaces, we will listen to Ramesh Kamble, Rohit De, and Anupama Rao. Ramesh Kamble is a professor of sociology at Mumbai University. Rohit De is a historian of South Asia and the author of People’s Constitution: Law and Everyday Life in the Indian Republic. Anupama Rao is a historian and the author of The Caste Question, published in 2009 by the University of California Press. Thenmozhi Soundararajan, a co-founder of Equality Labs, will help us understand the continuing significance of the Mahad satyagraha for anti-caste struggle today. Finally, Subodh More, a Mumbai-based activist, will give us a glimpse into the early life of his grandfather, RB More. Additional Material Anupama Rao, The Caste Question - Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Satyendra More, Subodh More, “Comrade RB More - A Red Star in a Blue Sky”, Communists Against Caste “An Interview with Subodh More”, School of Media and Cultural Studies Yashwant Zagade, “How Dalit-'Lower Caste' Unity Laid the Foundation for the Ambedkarite Movement”, The Wire Anupama Rao, “Dalit Communist RB More’s memoir presents the kind of history that governments like to erase today”, Scroll “Rohit De - The Global History of Rebellious Lawyering”, Yale University Rohit De, "Lawyering as Politics: The Legal Practice of Dr. Ambedkar, Bar-at-Law"