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On burning ground: The human cost of India’s push to produce more coal

20th March 2016

Fred Pearce reports: As part of India’s modernization program, Prime Minister Narenda Modi has called for doubling the nation’s coal production by 2020. If it moves forward, India seems set to create a mounting tide of victims — from the cycle-wallahs and refugees of Jharia’s coal fires, to the country’s air quality, to the planet’s climate….

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….

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”….

NEWS UPDATE #85

3rd March 2016

Sukumar Muralidharan reports on Catch News: This year’s economic survey is a catalogue of crises. For one thing, it records that the situation in agriculture has been dismal on account of two successive years of poor monsoons. This is only the fourth time in 115 years that such a misfortune has hit the Indian economy….

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….

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”….

NEWS UPDATE #84

24th February 2016

January was the globe’s most unusually warm month ever recorded, and the past three months have been the most unusually warm three-month period on record as well, according to NASA. It is the combination of manmade global warming and a record strong El Niño that’s bumped up temperatures to never-before-seen levels since at least 1880….

“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.”…

Marine parks in India – a case for maritime environmentalism

22nd February 2016

Aarti Sridhar writes: It is in the ordinary everyday life of fishers and in the political strategies of their leaders that one finds the outlines of a new kind of environmentalism which’s fluid and defies water-tight categorisations. This ethic suggests that it is futile to remain wholly preservationist or utilitarian, or entirely biocentric or anthropocentric….

CV Subrahmanyam/The Hindu

Subhash Palekar: From farmer to national treasure

18th February 2016

He did not form a people’s movement. Nor did he plead with the government to popularise his natural farming method. Palekar took a more direct route instead. He reached out to the farmers. Met them in person and trained them in his cultivation practices. He continues to spread awareness and hold training workshops for farmers….

NEWS UPDATE #83

17th February 2016

Common Dreams reports: A new analysis, published in Science Advances journal, reveals that global water scarcity is a far greater problem than previously thought, affecting 4 billion people—two-thirds of the world’s population. Previous analyses looked at water scarcity at an annual scale, and had found that water scarcity affected between 1.7 and 3.1 billion people….

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….

NEWS UPDATE #82

8th February 2016

Decision On GM Mustard Deferred *Mining interests and tribal rights on collision course *Former atomic energy regulator says India needs to pause nuclear plans *Lesser water recorded in Indian reservoirs than last year *Sikkim Organic Mission: We Need To Dig Deeper *Hydro dam boom threatens freshwater fish *Radioactive Water From Fukushima Leaking Into the Pacific…

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….