I'm a great lover of India and visit there almost every year -- in fact I'm going in less than a month's time to beautiful Kerala in the south west. But, sadly, bad stuff goes on there from time to time, and I was really saddened this morning to read this report in today's online Guardian. Delhi is being prepared for the Commonwealth Games in October, and in their determination to clean up the city and make it "world class", government officials have forcibly ejected people from their homes and ploughed down a free school, without giving the staff and pupils any warning at all:
The government bulldozers came to the school at 11am, after yoga and before English and Hindi lessons. The children and their teachers had three hours to clear the classrooms. By mid-afternoon, the Yamuna Riverbank school was rubble.
"They told us we were a security risk, so we had to go," headteacher Parminder Khaur Somal said. "All my children were crying. I don't know how we can be a threat to anyone."
Somal founded the school five years ago for 180 local slum children living on the banks of the Yamuna river on the outskirts of Delhi. In recent months, she and her pupils have watched a vast new complex of luxury apartments rise 500 metres away: the athletes' village for the forthcoming Commonwealth Games. "We never thought it could be a problem," Somal said.
You can read the rest of the article here. I got the picture from the Guardian website -- hope they won't mind.
