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livelihoods & rights

Protests gather pace across Narmada Valley after the Supreme Court asks the government to relocate all affected families by July 31

Narmada Bachao Andolan

Conflict/Dispossession

What Gujarat govt calls ‘historic’, could be catastrophic for 1,00,000 villagers

23rd June 2017

Fifty-six years after the foundation stone for the Sardar-Sarovar dam on the Narmada was laid, the Gujarat government has got permission from the Centre to shut its gates. It will open the gates of misery for more than 100,000 people, whose houses and land are likely to get submerged. A Down To Earth ground report….

ALTERNATIVES

Vinchurni: A story of rejuvenated land, water and wilderness

21st June 2017

From Vikalp Sangam: Located in the village Vinchurni, in Maharashtra’s Satara district, the 100-acre Maganlal Gandhi Smrutivan was originally a rocky grassland, that has since been transformed into a fertile estate that now teems with various interdependent lives. Behind this makeover is the 89-year-old former ‘Bhoodan’ activist Babulal Gandhi, aka Babu Kaka, and his family….

ALTERNATIVES

Former Planning Commission member Mihir Shah on the farm crisis

20th June 2017

From The Hindu: For long, we’ve said that the solution is to get people off farming. While we need more manufacturing jobs, latest projections show rural India will still have 800 million people in 2050. Moving people to the cities could deepen the urban imbroglio. So solutions have to be found for agriculture, and fast….

Conflict/Dispossession

Demonetisation has failed: Farmers’ anger is the final piece of evidence

18th June 2017

R. Jagannathan, Editor, Swarajya Magazine, writes: It is time for a mea culpa on demonetisation. This writer has been largely positive on the medium-to-long-term benefits of notebandi, as opposed to its short-term downsides. Now, especially after the farmer agitations for loan waivers, I believe the negative side is larger than the positive. It has failed….

Conflict/Dispossession

P. Sainath: Why are our farmers angry?

17th June 2017

From People’s Archive of Rural India: From farmers being shot dead in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh, to those across Maharashtra out on the streets, to those from Tamil Nadu on hunger strike in New Delhi not so long ago, this has been a season of agrarian discontent. Why is this happening, which way will it go?…

Consumerism/Lifestyle

Sustainable consumption, sustainability in the value chain and hawkers

There is a difference between an apple sold on a bandi and in a supermarket. It can happen that the price in the supermarket is lower, but it’s not difficult to understand that the ‘value’ added to it in a super market is more. Thus, the lesser the value added, the more sustainable it is….

Circle of Blue

Conflict/Dispossession

Forbes Magazine’s ‘Go bust’ prescription for Indian farmers is a death warrant

16th June 2017

A recent article by Tim Worstall on the Forbes website states that, in effect, India’s farmers should be allowed to go bust because that’s how economic development works. This response from Countercurrents.org traces the criminal role of neoliberal policies in undermining farmer’s independence and livelihoods to favour global agribusiness. The article has since gone viral….

A scene after violent clashes between farmers and the police at Pipliya in Mandsaur district of Madhya Pradesh

PTI

Conflict/Dispossession

Ground Report: How demonetisation brought MP farmers onto streets

13th June 2017

This series of timely reports from Hindustan Times surveys the explosive situation in Madhya Pradesh’s Mandsaur district, epicenter of the violent protests that left six farmers dead from police bullets. The lead article looks at the impact of demonetisation in creating the crisis, while another report examines the role of social media in organising farmers….

AFP

Conflict/Dispossession

Harsh Singh Lohit: Why do farmers protest?

12th June 2017

Why, please ask yourself, does the city get 24 hour electricity, schools, colleges, dispensaries, hospitals, roads, public transport, even cooking gas and the village either not at all or services that are a pale shadow of their urban selves? Why this inequality in allocation of resources, even though 68.84% of Indians live in rural areas?…

James Fryer/ Gear Patrol

Consumerism/Lifestyle

World Environment Day is now little more than a greenwashing opportunity

11th June 2017

Nitin Sethi writes: Whatever a government might do to run the economic engine of the country or its politics, it has to continuously claim that it is a win-win for both the environment and development. It will talk about its moves to set up zero-effect and zero-defect industries. We all know such an idea does not exist….

Vehicles set on fire by agitating farmers in Madhya Pradesh on June 7, 2017.

CLIMATE CRISIS

Why a bountiful harvest drove farmers to despair and anger

10th June 2017

IndiaSpend reports: A plentiful harvest in 2016 and imports drive some prices down 63%. A shortage of cash because of demonetisation. Despite Rs 3.5 lakh crore– invested over six decades to 2011, more than half of all farms depend on rains. These are the three factors agitating India’s 90 million families who depend on farming….

Enough! Farmers have been at the receiving end for far too long.

The Tribune

Conflict/Dispossession

It’s a farmers’ movement in Maharashtra, not a strike

9th June 2017

From The Tribune: Two developments seemed to have triggered the current protest. On the one hand, bumper crops have led to crashing down of crop prices for the farmer. On the other hand, the crop loan waiver announced by the newly elected BJP government in UP has reminded the famers of their long unfulfilled demand….

(From left) Johnson Jament, Lisba Yesudas and Robert Panipilla

Facebook

CLIMATE CRISIS

Speech by representatives of indigenous fisher folk at the first UN conference on oceans

8th June 2017

Friends of Marine Life (FML), is a Kerala-based organisation that specialises in seabed ecosystem studies and also helps promote sustainable fishing. Three of it’s members, who hail from the state’s indigenous fishing community, the Mukkuva, were recently invited the first UN conference on the world’s oceans. The text of speeches they delivered at the conference….

Paresh Nath/The Khaleej Times

Conserve/Resist

Why the fight for environmental justice is also a fight for social justice

6th June 2017

Nityanand Jayaraman writes: June 5 was World Environment Day. Over the last few days, this author, an environmental activist, has been asked by many people to lay out things that people can do without really straining their daily schedules. These simple things may not exist anymore. Instead, here are six things for everyone to consider….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Do you really know your fish? Presenting the Fish Calendar

4th June 2017

Fish are the last wild food, but our oceans are being picked clean, giving marine wildlife little chance to regenerate. Amrita Gupta speaks to the team behind a new seafood calendar. Until now, there was no such resource for fish eaters, yet the need for awareness about the seafood we consume has never been greater….

Conserve/Resist

T.S.R. Subramanian: Say no to GM mustard

3rd June 2017

Former Union Cabinet-Secretary T.S.R. Subramanian writes: The promises of higher yield and lower pesticide usage which induced many, including myself as the then Textile Secretary, to welcome Bt cotton have now been belied… The main advantage now trotted out in favour of GM mustard is increased yield—there’s sufficient evidence that this claim is a myth….

Conflict/Dispossession

How the disastrous Ken-Betwa link project endangers India’s tigers, rivers and mountains

1st June 2017

Ken-Betwa river-linking project, if realised, will destroy livelihoods and ecology, including a portion of the Panna Tiger Reserve. Curiously enough, ground reports show that farmers in the project area are themselves not keen on it. Also included is a documentary, ‘Links of a Broken Chain’, as well as a detailed technical analysis of the project….

H. G. Wells' 1895 novel 'The Time Machine' depicted a future where humans split into two species

Poverty/Inequality

Are we about to witness the most unequal societies in history?

Best-selling author and historian Yuval Noah Harari writes: As we enter the post-industrial world, the masses are becoming redundant. Biotechnology and the rise of Artificial Intelligence may split humankind into a small class of ‘superhumans’ and a huge underclass of ‘useless’ people. Once the masses lose their economic and political power, inequality could spiral alarmingly….

A mega power plant would have eliminated Vilambur's strong local economy that includes charcoal producers

Dhruv Malhotra © Wilson

ALTERNATIVES

Ground Report: India’s slow but sure shift away from coal

27th May 2017

Keith Schneider writes: It is almost impossible for a single place to embody the full array of emerging factors around climate, carbon, water, finance, culture and cleaner technology that have utterly changed how India and the world view the value and risks of coal. But if such a place exists, it’s Vilambur in Tamil Nadu….

V. Govindankutty at the Naubad karez, an ancient engineering marve

K.V.S.Giri

ALTERNATIVES

How Bidar beat back the drought

25th May 2017

From The Hindu: Bidar’s Naubad karez, or tunnel wells, are an ancient engineering marvel. It’s a complex system, which works inversely underground to leverage gravity — that is, the plateau’s natural gradient ascends from the mouth to the mother well but the tunnel underneath has been cut to descend from the mother well to the mouth….