Project Blackout

At a mass wedding in Madhya Pradesh just before the ceremony was to begin, a would-be bride developed labour pains, shocking those present. Virginity and pregnancy tests were ordered on the 152 prospective brides, of whom 14 were detected to be pregnant. The incident, that left activists and tribals fuming, occurred recently when the brides were assembled for a mass marriage function in Madhya Pradesh's Shahdol district, held under the Mukhyamantri Kanyadan Yojna - Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan's pet scheme aimed to help girls from poor families tie the knot at government expense. Marriages under the scheme are solemnised free of cost and all arrangements are made by the district administration. Every couple is also provided assistance in the form of household items to the tune of Rs 5,000.

The non-descript town of Bilaspur, an erstwhile princely state in the Sutlej Valley, now a district in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh is historical because hundreds of villages around it were submerged in the Sutlej River for the Bhakhra Dam almost 55 years ago. The new town of Bilaspur built upslope of the old, tells the tale of this submergence with its oustee populations on hill slopes and domes of stone temples sticking out of the river bed down in the valley. On 9th April 2009, almost 2000 people affected by dams, mines, urbanization and destructive 'development' projects in the state of Himachal Pradesh gathered and held a historical rally in the streets of Bilaspur shouting slogans of “Aaj Himalaya Jagega – Loootne wala bhagega” and “Vikas chahiye vinash nahin”.

A brown, life-size papier-mâché dog, its hind leg elegantly elevated, aims a stream of urine onto a large replica of Tata Tea packet. In January 2007, the dog was part of a tableau created as part of a ‘Boycott Tata’ procession by survivors of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Ironically, Tata’s efforts at corporate social responsibility had landed its best-known brand at the receiving end of fake dog piss. In a well-publicised series of letters written in 2006 by Ratan Tata to Finance Minister P Chidambaram, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the industrialist had professed a desire to act in the “national interest” by roping in “responsible corporates in the private sector” to clean up the contamination in Bhopal. But the real motive had been the “desire to bail out Dow Chemical and Union Carbide, who – as polluters – were required to clean up,” says Bhopal survivor and activist leader Rashida Bee.