News and Views

The revelations continue to trickle in about the Sri Lanka terror attacks. One report indicates that among the suspects who perpetrated the bombings are two women, one of them seeming absurdly young.

At least two were from very affluent families. Another brings out a damaging admission by Sri Lankan authorities, that the planning for the attack had been going on for months, a revelation that is likely to lead to considerable political repercussions.

And finally, the most recent news is of ongoing investigations into possible sleeper cells in South India, particularly Kerala and Tamil Nadu, that are related to the Sri Lankan attack. This is disturbing, to say the least.

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Game of Thrones season 8 episode 3 was one of the darkest episodes to date, and quite literally so. The last episode of Game of Thrones set us up emotionally for the bloody Battle of Winterfell in episode 3, which as expected claimed many lives. 

We saw the end of some of our beloved characters from the HBO show. From Knight King to Jorah Mormont, here’s looking at all those who died and the significance of their deaths. 

'Listen to the podcast for the full story' 

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One of the peculiar aspects of this election in Odisha is that the BJP, which hopes to have stamped itself as the BJD’s primary rival come 23 May 2019, needs the votes of erstwhile Congress voters more than anyone else, in order to dent the dominance of Naveen Patnaik and his party.

But does Patnaik’s BJD face a stiff challenge from either the BJP or the Congress? Have 19 years of uninterrupted rule gathered enough anti-incumbency to push the BJD out of power and Naveen Patnaik out of his chief ministership, or could the party sweep the Assembly and Lok Sabha polls in the state yet again à la 2014?

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India, today, is not only the world’s largest democracy but also its most mobile. There’s a constant movement from rural to urban, from city to city and guess how many migrants there are in the country roughly? 400 millions!

That makes India has both the largest migrating population and the largest voting population. And chances a good percentage of those who are listening to the podcast are migrants, working or studying in a city or state you were not born in! But for a lot of people being a migrant means better luck casting your vote next time!

Yet, there is little that we see the government doing in terms of addressing this issue with evidence based policy-making. To make our democracy substantive and inclusive, we need a collective conversation about what the gaps in the system are and how they are to be fixed. Tune in to this podcast for more!

This podcast is a collaboration between The Quint and India Migration Now.

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As per the leaked National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) report on jobs data in 2017-18, unemployment in Odisha was at a peak of 7.1 percent, one whole percentage point higher than the national average.

Biju Janata Dal’s Naveen Patnaik, who has held on to the chief minister’s chair for the last 19 years, has been unable to resolve the state’s employment divide, with thousands of youngsters continuing to migrate to neighbouring states like Andhra Pradesh in the search for jobs.

The state government’s high-profile deal with POSCO, the South Korean steel manufacturer, had been billed to be India’s largest FDI deal at the time it was signed in 2005. But the 12 billion USD investment project (52,000 crores) did not eventually see the light of day when after 12 long years of local resistance and regulatory hurdles, the South Korean giant officially withdrew from the state and surrendered the controversial land.

Two years after the 2017 exit, we visit the now desolate site in Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur district, and speak to locals about the decade of resistance, the woes of unemployment and the status of their land today. The region votes simultaneously for the next Assembly and Lok Sabha representatives on 29 April, in the fourth phase of the general election.

Can the jobs crisis hurt the ruling BJD in the ongoing elections?

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