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Livelihoods/Rights

All pics by P. Sainath/People's Archive of Rural India

P. Sainath: The sacred waters of a tanker

24th July 2016

From Ruralindiaonline.org: Rampant deforestation, extensive damming of the rivers, huge diversions of water for industrial projects and even elite resorts can be seen across the state. All these underlie Maharashtra’s terrible water crisis. They won’t get washed away by the monsoon, even if the media coverage of it dries up with onset of the rains….

Anupam Nath/Associated Press

Adivasi boy shot at by guards of ‘shoot-first’ Kaziranga national park

22nd July 2016

The Ecologist magazine reports: A 7-year old boy has been injured after getting shot by park guards in Assam’s Kaziranga national park, which operates a strict ‘shoot first’ policy. In the last nine years, an estimated 62 people have been shot dead by Kaziranga guards, four of whom were ironically arrested for alleged rhino poaching recently….

A view of the Sangatya farm

Sangatya Commune: An experiment in sustainable living

The New indian Express profiles ‘Sangatya’ commune, and its co-founder, Shreekumar a chemical engineer turned organic farmer and activist and Ecologise.in author. Sangatya, located in Nakre village near Karkala in south Karnataka, is experimenting with creating spaces for sustainable living. The commune is also a place to gain hands-on experience in many areas, including community-building….

Archival photo of a boat rally in protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam

Narmada Bachao Andolan

Spotlight: The Narmada valley’s unfolding social and ecological disaster

21st July 2016

Its 25 years since the Narmada Bachao Andolan started mobilising resistance against the destruction of life and livelihood in the Narmada valley. Today, with more than two lakh people who’ve not been resettled threatened with submergence, that resistance is being revived. A closer look at the history and politics of big dams on the Narmada river….

Watch: A blistering critique of India’s “destructive development”

19th July 2016

In this video, which has since gone viral, Binay Kumar, a corporate employee turned farmer addresses an audience in Bangalore, offering a sharp take on India’s rampant urbanization, catastrophic development model, the ongoing agrarian crisis and the rural-urban divide that feeds it. He states the obvious, but bitter truth: “Everybody wants to eat, but nobody wants to grow.”…

The global farm land grab in 2016: How big, how bad?

18th July 2016

In 2008, GRAIN exposed how a new wave of land grabbing was sweeping the planet in the name of addressing the global food and financial crises. Their new report shows that the global farmland grab is far from over. Rather, it’s in many ways deepening, expanding to new frontiers and intensifying conflict around the world….

Green activist arrested, beaten in custody, NGOs demand release

17th July 2016

On 8th July 2016, environmental activist Piyush Sethia and two colleagues were arrested in Salem, Tamil Nadu during protests against the construction of an over-bridge. On 14th July 2016, the Magistrate’s court dismissed Piyush’s bail application while granting conditional bail to the other two activists. Sethia has been kept in solitary confinement since his arrest….

Elephants raiding a banana plantation near Bannerghatta, Karnataka

Nishanth Srinivasaiah

The culling of wild animals herald future water wars in India

10th July 2016

Peter Smetacek writes: Culling wild animals that have come to depend on agriculture for sustenance is only a short-term measure. This was portrayed as a man-animal conflict rather than what it actually is: the conversion of our forests from rich storehouses of bio-diversity to green deserts by a combination of mismanagement, political expediency and ignorance….

On Brexit: The fertile ground of bewilderment

9th July 2016

Charles Eisenstein in a new blog-post: The Brexit vote marks a rare moment of discontinuity, when the usual normalizing narratives falter and a society experiences a fertile and frightening moment of bewilderment. Brexit, though, is a mere foreshadowing of the vertigo that will ensue with the next economic crisis, which will dwarf that of 2008….

Digital story of drought and death

Osama Manzar writes: As part of a digital literacy project in Maharashtra, rural students identified the following major consequences of drought— lack of water for basic needs, irregular supply of drinking water by government authorities, supply of unhygienic water, shortage of fodder for cattle, unemployment, health issues and lack of awareness about water conservation schemes….

Indigenous Terra Madre festival – The Shillong Declaration

7th July 2016

The Indigenous Terra Madre festival 2015 at Shillong brought together indigenous peoples from around the world to share knowledge about food, nutrition and biocultural diversity. The Shillong Declaration, asserts that everyone has a right to good, clean and fair food and consequently the responsibility to protect the heritage, tradition and culture that make this possible….

In Bangladesh, a growing movement to save the world’s largest mangroves from coal power attack

6th July 2016

Bangladesh’s 1,320 megawatt Rampal coal power project threatens to devastate the Sundarbans and the communities whose livelihoods depend on it. If completed, it will consume about 13,000 tons of imported coal daily, result in over six miles of river dredging each year, discharge highly toxic sludge, and release ten million tons of carbon dioxide annually….

Representational pic

Red alert: The Centre’s new law spells doom for the environment

5th July 2016

Ritwick Dutta writes on the Environment Ministry’s new draft notification, which if finalised, will sound the death knell for the crucial process of Environment Impact Assessment of developmental and industrial projects in India, and thus legitimise all violations of environmental law. The notification holds serious consequences, for the environment, and for ‘Rule of Law’ itself….

Modi and agribusiness: Doing business or corporate imperialism?

4th July 2016

Colin Todhunter writes: With Modi now at the helm, the government is doing the bidding of global biotech companies and is currently trying to push through herbicide-tolerant GM mustard based on fraudulent tests and ‘regulatory delinquency‘, which will not only open the door to GM crops but will boost the sales of Bayer’s glufinosate herbicide….

Why rural distress is not triggering organised farmer unrest

1st July 2016

Sayantan Bera reports: The sorry state of India’s farm movement is inextricably linked to the non-viability of farming now, said Vijay Jawandhia, a farmer leader from Wardha in Maharashtra. “Land holdings have become smaller and farmers everywhere are struggling to run a family and survive. Where is the time or resource to invest in a movement?”…

A view of the Athirapilly falls

Countercurrents.org

Athirappilly: Kerala’s destructive dam project that refuses to die

Neha Miriam Kurian writes: The Left-Front government in Kerala is reviving the Athirappilly Hydro Electric Project against stiff resistance from local tribes and environmentalists. If implemented, it will displace the ancient hunter-gatherer Kadar tribe and submerge the only remaining low elevation riparian forests left in the Western Ghats, one of the world’s eight biodiversity ‘hotspots’….

Video: P. Sainath at the Delhi assembly: Water and farm crisis are the defining problems of our time

28th June 2016

Catch News reports: In a new initiative by Speaker Ram Niwas Goel, proceedings for the day at the Delhi Assembly were kickstarted by a lecture series. The first lecture was delivered by veteran journalist P. Sainath, who spoke on ‘Water and Farm Crisis in India’, which he said were the defining crises of our times….

A calamity bigger than drought

27th June 2016

Archana Mishra writes: Authorities failed to use MGNREGA and NFSA provisions meant for relief in difficult times. Even delayed wage payments forced downtrodden farmers to migrate towards cities. The national average of MGNREGA wages delayed beyond the statutory limit of 15 days is 62 percent of all wage payments for 2015-16, an RTI query revealed….

Video & report: Time to ditch industrial agriculture: here’s the evidence

25th June 2016

‘ From Uniformity to Diversity: A paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems’, calls for breaking the chains that lock monocultures and industrial-scale feedlots to dominant farming systems in order to unleash truly sustainable approaches. In the accompanying video, Food MythBusters show why we really don’t need industrial agriculture to feed the world….

India’s heat waves spell doom for the working poor

Deaths due to heat waves in India have been in the thousands–in the years 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2015 in particular. Numbers, which are how the deaths are usually reported, are class- and gender-neutral. It’s one of the grave ironies of global warming that those least responsible for it are affected the most by it….