Conflict/Dispossession
From The Hindu: That those forests inhabited by Adivasis are some of the best conserved in the subcontinent is a long-standing fact contrary to the understanding of supposedly educated Indians. Sadly, the articulate arrogance of ‘New India’ prevents them from seeing any virtue in those communities who have lived in and by the forests since times immemorial….
Read More about Forest rights: The arrogance of the ignorant
Conflict/Dispossession
The UPA government didn’t have a stellar record on environment, but what has happened in past five years is unprecedented. The biggest statistical evidence for this lies in the Environmental Performance Index, where India was ranked the fourth-worst country (177) in the world out of 180 last year. Five years ago, India was ranked 155th….
Read More about Dhruv Rathee: Environment is the Modi government’s most under-reported disaster
Raghu Raman, senior Reliance executive and former CEO of India’s National Intelligence Grid
The Indian Express
ALTERNATIVES
A startlingly pessimistic vision of India’s looming environmental and economic collapse by a senior business leader deserves our urgent attention and ought to revive the debate on development, democracy and policy choices. It’s also the closest we have got to a confession from an insider as to what has really been going in the country….
Read More about India is not ‘self-destructing’ – it’s being destroyed systematically
CLIMATE CRISIS
From Climate Home News: Perhaps the most egregious fix, given the prominence of the issue and its consequences for Indians’ health, is the Modi government’s attempts to defer a December 2017 deadline for air pollution standards for thermal power plants. Without these, India’s hopes of reducing deadly air pollution from its electricity sector are nixed….
Read More about Modi and Adani: the old friends laying waste to India’s environment
Representative pic
ALTERNATIVES
Tribals make up 26% of Jharkhand’s population. Recently, many Adivasi villages in Jharkhand have put up giant plaques declaring their gram sabha as the only sovereign authority and banning ‘outsiders’ from their area. The Hindu reports on a political movement that is gathering steam across the State’s tribal belt, originally inspired by the PESA Act….
Read More about The Pathalgadi rebellion
Laxmi Gayakwad's Aarey colony home was razed in front of her eyes
Jyoti Shinoli/People's Archive of Rural India
Conflict/Dispossession
From PARI: The people of Aarey find their eviction and ‘rehabilitation’ absurd. Prakash Bhoir, 46, who lives in Keltipada, says, “We are Adivasis [he is a Malhar Koli]. This land is a source of income and survival for us. Can we do cultivation in those high-rise buildings? We just cannot live without soil and trees.”…
Read More about Caged in concrete: an Adivasi urban nightmare in Mumbai’s Aarey Colony
ALTERNATIVES
Dr Latha Anantha, an expert on rivers and one of the first names to crop up in the struggle to protect them, is no more. The founder and moving spirit behind the River Research Centre, Kerala, she was best known for her efforts to save the Chalakudy river. She’d been diagnosed with cancer in 2014….
Read More about ‘Nature gives us hope’: A tribute to Latha Anantha, river guardian
ALTERNATIVES
According to the legendary scholar Noam Chomsky, the world is “facing potential environmental catastrophe and not in the distant future,” and the only communities standing between humankind and catastrophe is the world’s Indigenous people. Here we present a selection of articles & essays on indigenous people and their fight to defend nature from ‘civilised’ humans….
Read More about Noam Chomsky: Indigenous people are our only hope for survival
Culture/Cognition
Nolina Minz writes: Critics have described ‘Newton’ as ‘brilliant, subversive and one of the finest political satires we have seen in recent years.’ But watching Newton left me deeply annoyed; as an urban adivasi I felt that the quintessential element of the movie was the unfailing poverty, backwardness, and marginality of adivasi communities in India….
Read More about An urban Adivasi’s perspective on ‘Newton’, India’s Oscar entry
Representative pic
ALTERNATIVES
Madhu Ramnath writes: Time and again we have heard that the Naxal insurgency is due to “under development” in areas like Bastar. Education is also supposed to deter Naxalism, according to some, but one may ask whose education? Fundamentally it’s about respect, dignity and trust in our behaviour towards others, in this case the Adivasi….
Read More about At the heart of India’s raging tribal insurgency is a simple thing: respect
ALTERNATIVES
Ashish Kothari & Pallav Das write: Genuine alternatives to the destructive juggernaut of corporate and finance capital are emerging as much from contemporary progressive resistance as from the wisdom of indigenous peoples’ and other traditional community world-views. “Radical Ecological Democracy” (RED) is one such emerging paradigm based on which we can fashion a meaningful future….
Read More about Is there a way out? Announcing the new Radical Ecological Democracy website
A village council meeting being held in Barkheda village to discuss community issues
Ishan Agrawal
ALTERNATIVES
From The Wire: With a predominantly tribal population, Barkheda is a typical central Indian village. A few years ago, the villagers took charge of their natural resources and established a village executive committee. The committee governs all the water bodies of Barkheda, which now has rules on water usage, based on the principles of equity….
Read More about How one village’s successful tryst with self-governance inspired others
Conflict/Dispossession
From Countercurrents.org: This article is about the struggle to save the rich, dense and old growth forests in Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra by the Madia Gond adivasis residing in these forests. Communities like theirs don’t celebrate World Environment Day, but it is in their struggles that the ecological and cultural wellbeing of our country currently rests….
Read More about Mining in Gadchiroli – building a castle of injustices
ALTERNATIVES
India’s Tribal communities are under extreme pressure, right from big dams and mines to violent insurgencies and militarisation engulfing their lands. In 25 years, will these communities cease to exist? Or, will they represent thriving, revitalised models of egalitarian sustainability that the rest of the world has come to recognise and is learning from? Felix…
Read More about Felix Padel: Adivasi economics may be the only hope for India’s future
A Baiga woman surveys the land in Amaniya panchayat, Chhattisgarh
Heera Bai
Conflict/Dispossession
Heera Bai reports: Across the Tribal Belt of Central India, indigenous communities are constantly being evicted from ancestral lands to make way for development projects, industry, tourism and government-sanctioned conservation initiatives. In the states of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the Baiga community have faced a legacy of evictions that dates back more than 30 years….
Read More about Conservation betrayals in Central India
Conserve/Resist
The Bishnois may be considered as India’s first environmentalists. The famous ‘Chipko Movement’ was inspired by the true story of Amrita Devi Bishnoi, who refused to let the king’s men cut trees in her village. Her head was severed. More than 300 people who did the same were killed for trying to protect the trees….
Read More about The Bishnois, India’s original environmentalists, who inspired the Chipko movement
Conflict/Dispossession
From The New York Times: At 82, the anthropologist T. N. Pandit passes his days in the gentle occupations of old age: poetry, a Buddhist study circle, a daily walk in the park. It is rare for anyone to ask him about the years he spent with the hunter gatherer tribes of the Andaman Islands….
Read More about A season of regret for an aging tribal expertConflict/Dispossession
From The Citizen: For his leading role in the historic 12-year legal battle that led to the protection of the indigenous Dongria Kondh tribe’s land rights against the mining giant Vedanta in Niyamgiri, Odisha, social activist Prafulla Samantara was chosen one of the six winners of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize, or the ‘Green Nobel’….
Read More about Prafulla Samantara, a “Maoist” for Vedanta and Odisha, earns global recognition
A Jarawa tribal receiving handout from tourist - a scene from the Andaman Trunk Road
Scmp.com
Bookshelf
Excerpt from Islands in Flux, by Pankaj Sekhsaria: These communities of thousands of individuals with a living lineage going back thousands of years have been brought to this sorry state in a mere 150 years. It began with the British and their policies, which have been kept up with clinical efficiency by modern, independent India….
Read More about How a statist vision of development has brought Andaman’s tribals close to extinction
J. Vijaya, India's first female herpetologist, lived alone for many months in a forest cave in Kerala to study cane turtles
Zai Whitaker
Conserve/Resist
This day thirty years ago, the bodily remains of J. Vijaya, India’s first female herpetologist and turtle field biologist, was found in a forest. She was only 28. The cause of her death remains unknown to this day. A moving tribute to one of the most memorable personalities in Indian wildlife conservation, by Janaki Lenin….
Read More about Tribute: Viji, the Turtle Girl
