The Suno India Show

This is part three of our miniseries on disability and technology on The Suno India Show, where we talk to people across a range of disabilities. In this episode, host Suryatapa Mukherjee speaks to Nandita Venkatesan who is a journalist. Nandita was struck with tuberculosis twice and lost her hearing because of side effects of  toxic tuberculosis medicines. She talks about how technology can exclu...

This is part two of our miniseries on disability and technology on The Suno India Show, where we talk to people across a range of disabilities. In this episode, host Suryatapa Mukherjee speaks to Sai Prasad Vishwanathan, the first Indian with a disability to set foot on and live on the Antarctic continent. He is also the first Indian with a disability to skydive which went down in the Limca Book o...

This is part one of our miniseries on disability and technology on The Suno India Show, where we talk to people across a range of disabilities. In this episode, host Suryatapa Mukherjee speaks to Apurupa, a neuroqueer sexuality educator. Apurupa talks about how they realised they have autism thanks to the internet and how different kinds of technology help them navigate the world more comfortably....

The Indian Constitution is a result of debates and deliberations by the Constituent Assembly over three years between 1946 to 1959. As a barely formed nation, what were the issues that bothered our leaders and intellectuals and how did they debate these issues. These debates are a reflection of the idea of India as a nation and the country’s aspirations  On the occasion of the 75th year of Indepen...

On July 21, HIV positive persons started protesting outside the National AIDS Control Organisation’s office in Delhi. They are protesting the stock outs of different medicines all over the country. Stock outs of anti HIV medicines have been reported for years now. HIV activists ask: Why can’t NACO fix this problem? In this episode, we speak with HIV positive activists such as Hari Shankar from Del...

The West Bengal government is working on opening a coal mine in the district of Birbhum. The mine in the Deucha Pachami area will be the largest in Asia and the second largest in the world. It will displace around 21,000 people, majority of whom belong to scheduled castes and tribes.  India is one of the governments around the world that have signed the UN Framework Convention of Climate Change. T...

The World Health Organisation has declared monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern. Nearly 70 countries have reported cases of Monkeypox so far. In July, India had its first known case of monkeypox in Kerala when a 35-year old man who returned from the Middle East was detected with the disease. Since then four cases have been detected, including one in Delhi from a person with...

From Hyderabad police snatching phones on streets to check for ‘ganja’ to Delhi police seizing journalist Mohammed Zubair’s devices for a tweet, such seizures have become a routine part of policing. After all, with modern technology, our personal devices have become repositories of our whole lives. So it gives the police easy access to all our information in one place, making investigations that m...

In celebration of 75 years of Independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced free booster doses at government vaccination centres for 75 days from July 15 to September 30, 2022. A few days after this announcement, the news website The Wire published a shocking story on how the Central Drug Standards Control Organisation - the CDSCO - the country’s drug regulatory agency- never approved of pr...

The Reuters Digital Report 2022 which surveyed 46 countries around the world to find out what is the state of news consumption today. It has several interesting findings. For example: Trust in news has decreased globally as people suspect political biases. Young people are especially likely to selectively avoid news because of it being depressing. Can’t really blame them can we?  But surprisingly,...

The episode, part of a mini-series sets context about why it is important to communicate well during a pandemic like COVID-19 and features discussions between Suno India editor-in-chief DVL Padma Priya and Prof Anant Bhan, a researcher in Global health, bioethics and health policy who works for a not-for-profit health policy organisation Sangath and also Dr Usha Raman, professor at the Department...

In May 2022, the Delhi High Court delivered a verdict on several petitions seeking to remove the marital rape exception in the rape law. Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code excludes sexual intercourse between a married couple. The verdict was split with Justice Rajiv Shakder ruling in favour of removing the exception, and Justice C Hari Shankar dismissing the petition.   In this episode, we try t...

In light of cases against Nupur Sharma for her comments about Prophet Mohammed on Times Now and against Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair for his comments about Hindu seers, we look at how to define the right to free speech in our current political climate. As hate speech is becoming increasingly common, so are threats to free speech and press freedom. In the 2022 World Press Freedom index, Indi...

On May 19, the Supreme Court passed an order observing that sex workers have the right to live with dignity under Article 21 of the Constitution. They came up with several directives to ensure that sex workers who are in the profession by choice can live a life of dignity.  In this episode of The Suno India Show, host Suryatapa Mukherjee spoke to Meena Saraswathi Seshu to find out what these...

In this episode of The Suno India Show, host Suryatapa Mukherjee speaks to Karishma and Leeza behind the Instagram handles @talkyounevergot and @leezamangaldas . Karishma has almost 50,000 followers and Leeza has over 8,30,000 followers. They are sex educators who use social media to reach people across the country. They are two among a growing number. In this episode, they explore what sex educat...

Suno India’s Menaka Rao visits Jahangirpuri area where riots broke out and demolition drive took place last month. On May 16, a procession was taken out on the occasion of Hanuman Jayanti which resulted in stone pelting and violence in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri area. On May 20, Delhi’s civic authorities started a demolition drive in the area, without giving any notice to the property...

It has been almost two months since medical students flew home to India from the war in Ukraine. While they deal with the trauma of their war experiences, students say the struggle is far from over. According to the regulations of the National Medical Commission, they will be disqualified from working as a doctor in India unless they finish their education in the same college. Now their future han...

Does our social identity, be it caste, religion, or tribe, affect how long we live? Two papers show that Dalits, Adivasi and Muslims have a disadvantage when it comes to life expectancy as compared to the higher caste Hindus. In this podcast Suno India’s Menaka Rao spoke to demographers Aashish Gupta, Sangita Vyas, both research fellows at the research institute for compassionate economics o...

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting is merging the Films Division (FD) the National Film Archives of India (NFAI), the Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI), and the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) under the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). The first four are public-funded bodies while the latter is a for-profit company that has been incurring losses. The four bod...

Now every summer, we talk about heat waves. And yet, it’s different every year. This year heat waves arrived earlier than usual in March and lasted longer than usual, going on for six weeks. And there are more to follow. In parts of Central and Northwest India, temperatures have already crossed 40-45 celsius. The Indian Meteorological Department has predicted that this summer will be hotter...

Press freedom is increasingly endangered across the world. At least 28 journalists were killed due to their work in 2021, with India and Mexico topping the list of countries with the most media worker deaths, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists . Journalists in many countries are feeling the pressure as they are arbitrarily imprisoned, silenced or killed in some instances, for the wo...

In April, the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill was passed in both houses of the Parliament. This new law allows law enforcement agencies to collect a range of private information from people arrested under any offence. The information can be stored for 75 years.  In this episode, Suno India’s Menaka Rao and Suryatapa Mukherjee try to understand the government’s objectives...

The World Health Organisation is in the midst of coming up with COVID-19 excess mortality estimates for all the 194 countries that are its members. The Indian government has been placing objections on the way this exercise is being done for a few months now. After a few reports came out on the subject, the Indian government responded in a press release saying that they have a quarrel with the meth...

On March 24, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare released the National Tuberculosis Prevalence Survey in India 2019 – 2021. The last such survey took place in 1955-58 after independence. The survey shows that 312 persons per 100000 people in the country have tuberculosis of all forms. The survey also has information on risk factors related to tuberculosis such as malnutrition, diabetes...

The Criminal Procedure (Identification) Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on March 28. And by April 6, it was passed in both houses of the Parliament. This new law allows law enforcement agencies to collect a range of private information from people arrested under any offence. The information can be stored for 75 years.  In this episode, host Suryatapa Mukherjee talks to Nikita Sonawane, c...