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Livelihoods/Rights

Livelihoods/Rights

P.Sainath, People's Archive of Rural India

Special: P. Sainath’s award-winning series on rural India’s ‘Thirst Economy’

11th March 2016

This series on rural India’s water crisis won P. Sainath a World Media Summit award under the category of Exemplary News Professionals in Developing Countries. It zeroes in on the stark contrasts in the consumption and access to water between the rich and poor to illustrate the alarming trend of inequalities in India and abroad….

Video & Report: Is India’s 100 smart cities project a recipe for social apartheid?

9th March 2016

Shruti Ravindran reports: In a monograph for a conference on smart cities, the economist and consultant Laveesh Bhandari described smart cities as “special enclaves” that would use prohibitive prices and harsh policing to exclude “millions of poor Indians… For if we do not keep them out, they will override our ability to maintain such infrastructure.”…

Towards Energy Democracy: A Vision Statement

6th March 2016

Unlimited growth and consumerist culture is incompatible with a finite world. We call for an urgent paradigm shift, from the currently dominant model of consumption-led development, to creating frameworks of human and ecological well being. This transition should be defined by the principles of sustainability, equity, and justice. (Adopted at the Bijli Vikalp Sangam, Bodh Gaya)…

A.R. Vasavi: The bitter reality behind the ‘pro-farmer’ budget

5th March 2016

Over the past three decades, average income of the farmer has increased by only 19%, while that of the government employee has by 370% and that of the corporate sector by more than a thousand per cent… Hidden in the rhetoric of being “pro-farmer and pro-poor” are the continued logic of being “pro-investor and pro-business”….

Budget Analysis: Don’t believe the hype, farmers have been short-changed again

2nd March 2016

Devinder Sharma writes: Jaitley wants the farmers to wait five years for their income to rise to 3,332 rupees a month. I can imagine the Economic Survey presented in 2022 proudly stating the success. But the reality is, by 2022, adjusting for inflation, the doubled income would be equivalent to what a farmer makes now….

Wikimedia Commons

More than Make in India, Jaitley needs to focus on Farm in India

29th February 2016

Devinder Sharma writes: Arun Jaitley’s economic agenda revolves around pushing reforms in order to lift growth and create jobs. But what is not being realised is that agriculture alone – the sector that has been neglected all these years – has the potential to create massive gainful employment, build domestic demand and thereby revitalise the sluggish economy….

Shanker Chakravarty/The Hindu

Make (Or Break) In India: Down to Earth special issue ahead of the Union Budget

28th February 2016

The Union Budget 2015-2016 will be presented in amid dwindling fortunes of the NDA government. Agriculture is already on a downswing while the economic slowdown is perceptible – all this when nine states are going to polls in 2016-17. Down to Earth presents a series of analyses of the Union Budget from the environment and development perspectives….

CEO of India’s first private weather forecasting organisation on strange weather trends

27th February 2016

SkyMet founder Jatin Singh says: When SkyMet had said there was an El Nino and the 2014 monsoon won’t be good, the reaction of the then person in charge of IMD was that El Nino was a western conspiracy to play with our devices. But the IMD’s forecast after 2014 became very El Nino based….

Attackers threw a toxic substance on Adivasi leader Soni Sori

Chhattisgarh: A ‘War without witnesses’ in the making?

26th February 2016

Sreekumar Kodiyath writes: The final phase of the Sri Lankan Government’s war with the LTTE in 2009 saw a systematic program to make the affair a private one, by expelling reporters and human rights activists from the war zone. Those who stubbornly remained either disappeared or were detained. The army called it a “War without witnesses”….

“The mindset of the Indian elite is: the poor are different from me and I don’t want them around”

R. V. Moorthy

Jan Breman: “76 per cent of the Indian population is living in poverty”

23rd February 2016

“India’s economic policies are determined by the World Bank. They are therefore pro-capital, and anti-labour. Today the World Bank’s at the end of its tether. Its formula of formal capital in the informal economy failed because the poor don’t own capital. Having run out of ideas, they’ve now started blaming the poor for being poor.”…

As automation increases in India, so does inequality

21st February 2016

Jahnavi Sen reports: According to a new research paper by Radicka Anand, capital intensity of production has been increasing across industries in the last decade. This is true not only in capital intensive industries (or those industries whose capital intensity is higher than the median of the manufacturing sector), but also for labour intensive industries….

Dongria Kondh protest against the Vedanta mine appeal.

Bikash Khemka/Survival

Power in India: radical pathways to local self-rule

15th February 2016

Ashish Kothari & Pallav Das write in State of Power report: People are recognizing that the current power dispensation is frozen in an intellectual paradigm defined by free-market orthodoxy and will change only if confronted by worldviews such as swaraj or Radical Ecological Democracy. India (and the world) needs that change in order to continue to thrive….

Video & Report: The jungle gangs of Jharkhand

14th February 2016

Kumar Sambhav Shrivastava reports: Groups like JJMP and TSPC thrive on a levy collected from mining. Jharkhand accounts for nearly a third of India’s coal, a quarter of its iron ore and 16% of copper. In return, the armed groups provide protection to mining companies and intimidate villagers to facilitate land acquisition for the companies….

Map shows India leads the world in ecological conflict

12th February 2016

SciDev Net reports: India, Colombia and Nigeria have the most cases of conflict caused by climate change and environmental disputes, according to a map of global ecological conflict. The Environmental Justice Atlas shows that more than 200 conflicts in India are caused by ecological disputes and scarcities of basic resources such as water and forests….

Pradeep Gaur/Mint

India’s high growth rate and the price of food

10th February 2016

Sudipto Mundle writes: India’s current high growth is organically linked to food price inflation, and the rising margin between the wholesale and retail price of food. Should we continue to celebrate India’s status as the world’s fastest growing economy, while leaving it to consumers to cope with rising food prices as best as they can?…

25 March 2015. Farmer Nityagopal Barman (43) committed suicide, after being unable to repay his loans

AFP

A Marathwada farmer’s wake-up call to India: try to understand why we die

1st February 2016

Rajabhau Deshmukh, a farmer from Beed says: We’ve been reaping merely 20-30% of our average crop in the last few years. Even as bank loans, moneylenders’ debts, relatives’ credits and the interest keep gnawing at us, we’ve to somehow run our homes. To be honest, it seems we are not even allowed to fall sick….

Video & Report: India’s indigenous people are holding fast to food traditions against all odds

Bowing To No One, the first film in a series by Sarah Khan, is about Satyavati, an indigenous woman farmer from Central India, who comes from a rich but rapidly eroding agro-ecological knowledge system. Also in this post is a report from Meghalaya’s Terra Madre festival, which brought together around 600 members of international indigenous food-making communities….

Aadi Kumbruka with various types of legumes, millets, oilseeds and corns grown on his farm.

India Water Portal

Tribals in Odisha humour changing skies with mixed platters

26th January 2016

Nauri grows 72 varieties of crop on his two-acre farm. “The benefit of mixed cropping is that even in extreme weather events, we get something out of the field. Some crops work well in drought, others in flood. Compare this with mono cropping which won’t even yield enough to eat in severe drought”, he explains….

George Varghese

Weathering The Change - A Farmer’s Diary of 2015

19th January 2016

The rains have let us down terribly this year. There were farmers in our area who did not bother planting their rice crop when they realized that it wasn’t going to rain much this year and then there were others that took a chance and planted but didn’t bother harvesting since the crop was a disaster….

Morvarid Fernandez

Winds of change – A view from Nersa

17th January 2016

Morvarid Fernandez writes: Our crops failed, cattle graze the dry paddy straw, and fields remain fallow because there is not enough water. Bore wells are deeper, the lines longer, and the black blister bug – usually a bane – simply did not appear last year. The monsoon of 2015, you ask. But there just wasn’t one….