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rural-urban divide

CLIMATE CRISIS

Jason Hickel: The Nordic model is a disaster for the environment

8th January 2020

From Al Jazeera: Scandinavian countries have some of the highest levels of happiness on the planet, and top virtually every ranking of human development. They re worth celebrating for all they get right. But there’s a problem. They’re an ecological disaster, with some of the highest levels of resource-use and CO2 emissions in the world….

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Conflict/Dispossession

Beggars as choosers: Why India’s poor opt to beg

6th December 2019

Beggars are usually ignored on the streets and questions are asked about why they don’t work. But many have indeed worked as paid labour and have chosen begging as the primary activity, finds Sabina Yasmin Rahman. As India’s urban and rural poor reel from a state-made economic crisis, this revealing study takes on an urgent relevance….

ALTERNATIVES

Why technological solutions cannot combat ecological challenges

24th October 2019

From The Hindu: More fuel-efficient cars usually mean that car owners take many more trips, in effect nullifying the saving of fuel from the technical innovation. This simple example shows why any advocacy of a lasting technological solution to ecological challenges is only destined to set the stage for the next generation of ecological problems….

Mayank Aggarwal/Mongabay

Conflict/Dispossession

The invisible victims of an unfinished city

15th October 2019

From Mongabay India: First envisaged in the early 2000s, Lavasa was touted as independent India’s first privately owned hill city. But over the years, the project faced numerous legal cases of usurping the land of villagers and violating environmental conditions. It’s now a ghost town with empty, unfinished construction or buildings vacated by their occupants….

Consumerism/Lifestyle

We have drought-proofed our cities, and left farms and farmers to die

1st July 2019

Devinder Sharma writes: This year, nearly 82% of Karnataka is reeling under drought. But in Bangalore, you won’t get even a hint of the terrible human suffering that continues to be inflicted year after year. Karnataka has suffered drought for 12 out of the past 18 years. But life in Bangalore has never been affected….

Conserve/Resist

Spotlight: Manifesto of Indian Farmers

13th December 2018

This manifesto was adopted by an assembly representing the farmers of India on the occasion of the historic Kisan Mukti March organised by AIKS at Delhi, on 30 November 2018. Over the past 25 years, more than 3,00,000 of India’s debt-ridden farmers have committed suicide, a crisis which successive governments have done little to address….

Conflict/Dispossession

Enough! Why 1,00,000 farmers are marching to Delhi on November 30

21st November 2018

From The Telegraph: India’s farmers are marching once again to demand that Parliament discuss the agrarian crisis. The underlying message is simple. If over 3,00,000 debt-ridden farmers have committed suicide in the past 25 years, then the agrarian crisis is no longer an economic one. It’s a moral crisis. It cannot be allowed to continue….

Illustration: Sumit Kumar/BBC

Conflict/Dispossession

Chai with Narasimha

3rd November 2018

This is a snapshot of a fleeting encounter between a Karnataka farmer and a water activist at the premises of a leading agricultural university. In a few painful sentences, it captures the everyday desperation that is the lot of the average Indian farmer, caught between an unraveling climate, a ruthless market and a malignant state….

Consumerism/Lifestyle

“Two” – A film fable by Satyajit Ray

13th August 2018

In 1964, renowned filmmaker Satyajit Ray was asked to create a short film for a TV-showcase by American oil company Esso. Asked to write and direct the film in English, Ray opted instead to make a film without words. The result is a poignant fable of modernity and ‘development’, which remains just as relevant today.

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ALTERNATIVES

What would a thriving rural space look like?

3rd August 2018

Shashank Kalra writes: We have a vivid vision of a thriving urban space; but what would a thriving rural space look like? This was one of the key questions I went with in this Gramya Manthan, a rural immersion-programme. Here, I shall bring up some of the subtler issues, which aren’t ‘rural issues’ but all-pervasive….

Laxmi Gayakwad's Aarey colony home was razed in front of her eyes

Jyoti Shinoli/People's Archive of Rural India

Conflict/Dispossession

Caged in concrete: an Adivasi urban nightmare in Mumbai’s Aarey Colony

7th May 2018

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.”…

From the farmers' protest organised by the All Indian Kisan Sabha in Mumbai

Reuters/Danish Siddiqui

ALTERNATIVES

Farmers’ protests reveal growing anger against India’s development model

23rd April 2018

Ashish Kothari & Aseem Shrivastava write: The growing protests of farmers around the country-last month’s protests in Mumbai being the latest-is not just a claim for dignity. Even more portentously, it calls into question the paradigmatic rationality of the reigning development model. Alternatives do exist, practised and conceived of at hundreds of sites in India….

ALTERNATIVES

Jean Dreze: Jholawala Economics for Everyone

13th January 2018

‘Jholawala’ is a derogatory term that India’s urban elites use to dismiss the arguments of social activists without having to contend with them. Jean Drèze is a prime example of a jholawala who is also a first-rate economist whose arguments cannot be dismissed easily. A condensed version of the thought-provoking introduction to his new book….

Culture/Cognition

An urban Adivasi’s perspective on ‘Newton’, India’s Oscar entry

25th October 2017

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….

A village council meeting being held in Barkheda village to discuss community issues

Ishan Agrawal

ALTERNATIVES

How one village’s successful tryst with self-governance inspired others

13th August 2017

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….

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?…

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Food/Farming

How come Bangalore doesn’t give an inkling of the severe drought in its backyard?

17th May 2017

Devinder Sharma writes: The development process is so designed that cities have been made drought proof over the years… Life in the mega city does not even provide an inkling of a severe drought prevailing everywhere in the state, where as many as 139 of the 176 taluks have been declared drought hit this year….

Gujarat-based Amul kick-started the milk revolution in India

Consumerism/Lifestyle

How Indians started drinking milk (and what it has cost us)

17th April 2017

Many people think that milk is normal good food. But a large part of the world until recently never consumed the milk of other animals. Even today, Eastern Asia as a rule does not use milk. So, for some, milk is the greatest food, while for others, milk is one of the five white poisons….

ALTERNATIVES

Five families that gave up city life for the rural dream

9th March 2017

TheNewsMinute reports: About a half-hour distance from the Tiruvannamalai government bus depot lies the Marudam Farm School in Kanathampoondi… It was in 2009 that the idea for the farm school was born when Govinda and his wife Leela came here for an afforestation project. It was then the couple dreamt of building a sustainable community….

Consumerism/Lifestyle

The mind’s river: How a life along the Cauvery stilled my anxieties

23rd February 2017

Wildlife biologist Nisarg Prakash writes: After a flare-up in my depression and increasingly erratic behaviour, I was shunted out from a landscape that I once knew like the back of my hand. It was here that I’d retreated to the land, to the hills, valleys and streams as a poultice for the cuts and bruises….