livelihoods & rights Archives - Page 19 of 19

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….

“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.”…

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….

Conflict/Dispossession

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….

Conserve/Resist

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

1st February 2016

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….

The Hindu

GREEN POLITICS

Yogendra Yadav and Vandana Shiva call for a green party in India

29th December 2015

Vasanth Srinivasan of The Hindu quotes former AAP leader Yogendra Yadav as saying, “there is a crying need for environmental politics” in India, but with the following caveat. “If green politics does not restrict itself as urban environmental activism but emerges as a binding agent of various marginalised groups and concerns, it definitely has a future in India.”…

CLIMATE CRISIS

NEWS UPDATE #73

18th November 2015

Overheated Planet Entering ‘Uncharted Territory at Frightening Speed’ Common Dreams With new evidence that the concentration of greenhouse gases broke yet another record in 2014, the head of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned on Monday that the warming planet is hurtling “into uncharted territory at a frightening speed.” The United Nations weather agency’s latest…

Development/Growth

Course: Understanding Rural India

2nd October 2015

Azim Premji University Azim Premji University, Bangalore, is holding a non-residential introductory course, Understanding Rural India: Life and Livelihoods at the Base of the Pyramid, aimed at those who are relatively new to the development sector. Dates: Nov 16 – 26, 2015 Venue: Bangalore Rural India is undergoing unprecedented transformations, which have profound impact on the…

Development/Growth

Sustainable Development: Stories from those making it possible

30th May 2015

A publication by FLEDGE, Chennai From the Preface: While a large amount of time and energy is spent on deciding the future of sustainability using the Rio+20 outcome document ‘The Future We Want’, limited space is available for local communities to tell their stories on how simple, on-the-ground initiatives are being pursued enabling them to…

Conflict/Dispossession

Narendra Modi’s war on the environment

15th April 2015

Rohini Mohan reports: In under a year, the Modi government has begun to undo policies of fair land acquisition, undermine environmental protection and reverse the fight for tribal rights. The finance, environment and rural-development ministers, and Modi himself, have called these safeguards to protect people’s property, the environment and tribal rights “roadblocks” to economic growth….

Conflict/Dispossession

Rohini Mohan: The Modi Government’s war on environment

15th October 2014

Basudev Mahapatra writes: Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, has “delinked forest clearance from clearance by the National Wild Life Board and halved NBWL clearance requirements from 10km to 5km around forest reserves, besides emasculating the Board by replacing eminent experts and concerned NGOs with rubber stamps. He has also relaxed procedures of the Forest Conservation Act….

Conflict/Dispossession

Environment Under Siege in New India

28th June 2014

Papri Sri Raman reports: The new environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, met Defense Minister Jaitley on June 10 and later announced a policy that would enable India’s border states with Pakistan, China and Burma to clear defense projects falling within 100kms of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), without approaching the union government for environment clearances….

Conflict/Dispossession

Bittu Sahgal: Narendra Modi’s development plan: Will it hang India’s wildlife?

24th June 2014

The lion, tiger, turtle, butterfly, orchid, mudskipper and one-horned rhino will need every helping hand to survive the development ambitions of a nation that believes that economic ambitions can be fulfilled at the cost of its wildernesses. We know that’s not possible and hope that you will move us away from the subcontinent’s biological-climate precipice….

ALTERNATIVES

May Day – Let us talk ‘Degrowth’

1st May 2014

Aditya Nigam, Kafila.org I saw men on television (trade union stars, Cabinet Ministers, left-wing think tank advisers) visibly hystericized by talking economics: eyes would glaze, shoulders hunch, lips tremble in a sensual paroxysm of ‘letting the market decide’, ‘making the hard decisions’, ‘levelling the playing field’, ‘reforming management practices’, improving productivity’…those who queried the wisdom…