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Ratan Tata at the Bangalore Aero Show, 2013. The Tata Group is a major player in both mining and defence manufacturing.

Development/Growth

India’s rising Corporate-Military Complex: A critical appraisal

15th March 2016

Rahul Varman writes: Bauxite or iron mines are opened up by grabbing people’s lands and homes against great resistance, and UAVs and other increasingly sophisticated weapons are used to quell this resistance. The corporate sector benefits both from the mining, as well as the demand for weapons, demand which is independent of the vagaries of the market system….

P.Sainath, People's Archive of Rural India

Development/Growth

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….

NEWS ARCHIVE

NEWS UPDATE #86

10th March 2016

Bill McKibben reports: On March 3, across the northern hemisphere, the temperature, for a few hours, crossed a line: it was more than two degrees Celsius above “normal” for the first time in recorded history and likely for the first time in the course of human civilization. Two degrees Celsius is the must-not-cross red line….

Development/Growth

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.”…

ENERGY

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)…

Development/Growth

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”….

CLIMATE CRISIS

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….

Development/Growth

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

Development/Growth

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

Development/Growth

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….

CLIMATE CRISIS

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

Conflict/Dispossession

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”….

CLIMATE CRISIS

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

Bookshelf

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.”…

ECOCIDE/EXTINCTION

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….

Development/Growth

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….

Bookshelf

Graphic novel: The beginning of Delhi’s water wars

20th February 2016

Everyone, deep in their hearts, is “waiting for the end of the world to come,” said Murakami. If not the end, then at least a good showdown’s definitely expected. Sarnath Banerjee‘s latest graphic novel envisions a similar war in the near future. Fittingly, the war’s going to be fought over something as elemental as water….

CV Subrahmanyam/The Hindu

ALTERNATIVES

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….

CLIMATE CRISIS

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

ALTERNATIVES

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….