The Suno India Show

Recently many Information technology-based companies including Meta, Twitter, Byju’s, Unacademy among others announced layoffs. Suno India’s Menaka Rao speaks to  Aabid Firdausi, a Ph. D. scholar in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His focus is on labour relations and unionisation. In 2020,  he wrote a paper on unionisation at the IT industry in Kerala after conducting fieldwork at an IT par...

In November 2022, Edtech firm Byju's announced 2500 layoffs. However, in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala after intervention by a welfare organization called Pratidhwani, Byju restored about 150 jobs of those in Thiruvananthapuram.  This is the first podcast in a two-part series about IT sector layoffs. This podcast is about specific strategies employed by collectives, such as Pratidhwani and some union...

We have come a long way since the AIDS epidemic of the 80’s and 90’s. Some of the groups that the HIV intervention programs focused on are men having sex with men and transgender women. In fact that is how the fight against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalises “unnatural sexual” relationships began as liberation is key to queer people’s health. Despite the advancements since, que...

In a complaint from a woman who suffered severe injuries after a pit bull attacked her, a Gurugram district consumer forum banned 11 foreign breeds of dogs in its district. Several cases related to street dogs are being heard both in high courts and the Supreme Court. Suno India’s Menaka Rao speaks with Neha Panchamiya, an expert on this issue. Neha is the Founder and President of RESQ, Pune, and...

The Supreme Court ruled that 10% reservation for Economically Weaker Sections in the General category is constitutional. In this episode of In Our Opinion, host Suryatapa Mukherjee speaks with journalist Tejas Harad about what this means for our reservation policy going forward. Previously, reservation was based on social, educational, political as well as economic backwardness. However, with EWS,...

The current boom of K-dramas in India has been in the works for decades. First, it spread in the North Eastern part of India. Then we saw it on Zee Zindagi. And finally, during the pandemic, the frenzy took over the country. Korean is now the fastest growing language in the country. In this episode of The Suno India Show, host Suryatapa Mukherjee speaks to Deepanjana Pal about why we love Kdramas....

Recently, the Delhi Police arrested Aftab Poonawala for allegedly killing his live-in partner, Shradda Walker. As is often in the case of such murders, there was history of domestic violence. Shraddha allegedly told her friends that she was assaulted several times by her partner.  We are replaying an older episode from our series Pinjra Tod Kar, reported by Padma Priya DVL. It follows the story of...

October 1 was National Voluntary Blood Donation Day. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare organised a massive drive- #RaktdaanAmritMahotsav- starting from September 17 - which is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday all the way up to October 1. The Ministry claimed that they collected a record number of blood units- about 1.68 lakhs in a single day. But how do blood centres cope for the re...

The Global Hunger Index 2022 ranks India at 107 among 121 countries. Afghanistan is the only country in South Asia that performs worse than India on the index. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, prevalence of undernourishment in India declined from 2005 onwards, but the trend was reversed beginning in 2016. From 13.3% in 2017, it rose to a 14-year high of 16....

Womeniya, an all female music band from Dehradun is a power packed combination of four women musicians who have fought against set traditions of society and family; and have not hesitated to take risks to realise their dream of pursuing a career as female musicians. Sudeshna Chowdhury brings you their story.  See sunoindia.in/privacy-policy for privacy information.

India ranks first in the number of road accident deaths across 199 countries. According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s latest 2022 report , 1.55 lakhs people were killed in road crashes in 2021. The death of former Tata Group chairman Cyrus Mistry in September has renewed efforts to improve road safety across the country. Since then, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gad...

On September 28, the Ministry of Home Affairs declared the Popular Front of India (PFI) a banned institution under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. This ban came after arrests of more than 100 leaders all over the country followed by protests. The government said that PFI was involved in several criminal and terror cases, and is a major threat to the internal security of the country. Suno...

Since July, huge amounts of cash have been seized by central agencies from various key figures in West Bengal politics. It all started with Partho Chatterjee who was at the time the Education Minister of Bengal. At different properties of his close associate Arpita Mukherjee, the Enforcement Directorate seized around 50 crore rupees in connection with the Staff Selection Commission scam or the SSC...

This is the third episode of our miniseries “In the Red” on the blood supply shortage in the country. If you are listening to this episode, do make sure you have heard Part 1 and Part 2 of this mini-series In the Red.  In this last episode, we try to understand the universe of blood banking and blood transfusions. Suno India’s Menaka Rao reports from Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh trying to understand...

While in many parts of the world, a child living with blood disorders such as thalassemia or sickle cell anemia can practically live a normal life, in most of India they may not survive up to adulthood. This is because of a lack of regular blood supply and monitored treatment for these children.  In this episode Suno India’s Menaka Rao speaks to people who suffer from blood disorders such as thala...

In the Red is a mini-series in the Suno India Show on the blood supply shortages in the country, particularly in rural India. The reporting for this series is supported by Turuga Foundation that awarded Menaka Rao the Narender Revelli National Media Fellowship, 2021.  Suno India’s Menaka Rao travelled to parts of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh to report on how the insufficient supply of blood in the b...

In this episode of The Suno India Show, reporter Suryatapa Mukherjee speaks to Satya Bharti regarding the recent go-ahead by the National Medical Commission (NMC) allowing Indian students who were pursuing their medical degree in Ukraine to make use of the academic mobility option offered by Ukraine. This allows them to transfer to other universities to complete their education while their degree...

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Tattle civic tech have created Uli, a machine learning tool that can be used on certain internet browsers to limit online gender based violence or OGBV. In this episode of The Suno India Show, host Suryatapa Mukherjee spoke to Tarunima Prabhakar, the research lead and co-founder at Tattle civic tech, Cheshta Arora, a researcher at CIS studying intersec...

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, has the largest collection of Naga material culture in the world (around 6466 items), including the human remains of Naga ancestors. Anthropologists Dolly Kikon and Arkotong Longkumer have been working as part of a community-led initiative to ensure the return of the Naga ancestral remains to their rightful home in Nagaland. Through this project, Dolly an...

Wular lake in Kashmir is a main source of livelihood for families who live by it. While the men are expected to go fishing, or even step out of the village for daily wage labour, the cleaning of the lake is considered the duty of women. Women go out in boats at the crack of dawn and deweed the lake every single day.  In this podcast, independent journalist Baseera Rafiqi speaks with the women who...

Entertainment journalism platform Film Companion and media consulting firm Ormax Media conducted a study and released the O Womaniya report. It looks at the state of women in the industry onscreen as well as behind the scenes. It found that only 10% of heads of departments are women. It has collected various other data about women directors and editors, films passing the bechdel test, trailer talk...

In August 2022, the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University released a report saying that they have detected a community on Twitter that is promoting self-harm. These tweets have graphic photos with bloody depictions of self-harm. The use of some hashtags went up by 500% over the past 11 months, according to the report, despite reporting on it. World Suicide Prevention day fall...

The World Suicide Day falls on September 10. As per the World Health Organisation, an estimated 703000 people die by suicide every year. The recent data from National Crime Records Bureau or NCRB recorded the highest levels of suicides in the country. Last year 1.64 lakh persons died by suicide- an increase of 7.2 percent from 2020. This is the first time in suicide rates in India has hit 12 per 1...

On August 15, 11 convicts in the case relating to Bilkis Bano during the 2002 Gujarat Riots were released. The 11 convicts were serving life sentences, and the jail time was commuted. Bilkis was 21 years old and five months pregnant when she was gang-raped while fleeing riots. In this incident, her three-year-old daughter along with six others were killed. Menaka and Padmapriya DVL discuss the str...

Revadi culture seems to be the buzzword in politics today. It started with a speech made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and now has been responded to by many leaders including Delhi Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal, Tamil Nadu Finance Minister, P Thiagarajan among others.  Suno India’s Suryatapa Mukherjee spoke to Dipa Sinha who teaches economics in Ambedkar University to understand the politics b...