<p>Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of Arun Tiwari Vs State of Uttar Pradesh dated 06/05/2024.</p> <p>In the application, the allegation is of illegal mining of soil upto 10-15 mtrs.
MELBURNIANS can expect water restrictions to remain for several years until massive infrastructure projects are completed, including the desalination plant due to begin operating in 2011. The city's water supply is in better shape than at this time last year but a drier autumn looms. Water Minister Tim Holding said yesterday some restrictions would continue until major projects were completed. Water Services Association of Australia executive director Ross Young said Melbourne ended February with its catchments 35.5% full, up from 34.2% at this time last year. He attributed the increase to a fall in water consumption, down 9% on the previous year, and more summer rainfall, 10% above average. However, Mr Young said dry soil throughout the state meant higher rainfall was not delivering the boost to reservoirs that might be expected. The streams that fill Victoria's reservoirs were flowing at only 58% of the long-term average flow. Water storage levels in Ballarat were at just 9.5%. Meanwhile, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission yesterday warned that flooding rains in Queensland and above-average summer rainfall in the upper Murray River would bring little or no relief for Victorian irrigators. Total inflows into the Murray system are still only a quarter of the long-term average. Victorian irrigators will receive only 42% of their entitlements this financial year, with worse likely for next year. With CHRIS HAMMER
At this time of year, Jasabi village in Lhuentse is calm and quiet. There is not much activity as farmers serenely prepare for the spring season which heralds yet another busy farming cycle. But the farmers from about 15 households in this village dread summer. They fear summer not because of the drudgery of farm life, but for a common problem they share every summer - the Jasabi bridge. The suspension bridge over the Kurichhu river in Kurtoe gewog, which is a lifeline for the village, is about 23 years old and about to fall apart, according to farmers. Over the years, the river has eaten into the foundation of the bridge, which was built in 1985. "I think the bridge will not survive the swelling river, forget a flood,' said a worried farmer. There is enough reason for concerns. Jasabi is a two- to three-hour walk from the nearest farm road in Dungkhar. It is the only bridge that connects the village to the dzongkhag headquarters, the hospital, and the gup's office. "Even to sell a few village products, we have to cross that bridge,' said another farmer. "If the bridge breaks down, our children will miss one academic session because the school is on the other side of the river.' "We'll be isolated,' said the village tshogpa, Pema Wangchuk. According to him, there is no other means to get to Lhuentse if the bridge is washed away. "During winter, we can wade through but, with the Kurichhu swelling in summer, there's no other way to get across.' However, Dzongkhag officials are aware of the concerns of the Jasabi farmers. According to the dzongkhag engineer, Tshering Chophel, the bridge would be renovated in the first year of the 10th Plan. "The bridge is risky and we've already made plans to renovate it,' said the engineer. "We'll provide protection to the foundation of the bridge, so there's no need for a new bridge,' he said. "The wooden deck will also be repaired.' The Kurtoe gup added that the importance of the bridge was long realized and included in the Plan. Contributed by Tashi Yetsho
Nath: Where Will Funds Come From? The mega loan waiver announced by the Manmohan Singh government is running into some in-house scepticism with doubts about funding for the give-away being aired in the Cabinet. On Monday, a meeting of the Cabinet saw commerce minister Kamal Nath asking whether the government had made provisions for the Rs 60,000 crore scheme it has announced in the Budget. He also seemed to argue that it would have been better if the Cabinet had been taken into confidence. Sources said that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh intervened to commend finance minister P Chidambaram and the loan waiver. Foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee also said that the finance ministry has chalked out the broad direction and details will soon be worked out. This reflected doubts put forward that the waiver unfairly lumps farmers tilling irrigated lands with those in dry-land conditions and that the two hectare cut-off for beneficiaries cannot apply across the country. Wondering whether the waiver would benefit distressed farmers, minister of state for new and renewable energy Vilas Muttemwar told TOI, "The problem lies in many farmers in areas like Vidarbha owning up to 15 acres of land, but being very poorly off. It is not just the small farmer, even those with larger holdings, who actually can access credit, are suffering.' Muttemwar said he would speak to the Prime Minister and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and ask for the eligibility for the Rs 60,000 crore waiver announced by the government to be altered in a state or regionwise manner. He also said that even smaller farmers might not be able to use the waiver as they were largely indebted to private money lenders. Muttemwar disputed agriculture minister and NCP boss Sharad Pawar's call to farmers to stop paying money lenders. "This is easier said than done. These loan sharks get farmers to sign agreement to sale documents. Even those sales are being closely scrutinised, it is not easy for farmers to simply throw off the yoke of money lenders,' he said. The minister's views could be some cause for worry as he represents Nagpur, the political centre of the Vidarbha region which has been reeling from suicides by farmers. The criticism that farmers who need help might be outside the waiver also dovetails with the argument that UPA's largesse will help well-off agriculturalists in areas like western Maharashtra. Well-known agro-economist M S Swaminathan agreed that it was difficult to compare farmers from green revolution states with those in impoverished dust bowls. "Comparing farmers owning two hectares in Punjab with those with holdings of similar size in Rajasthan or Vidarbha is unfair. The size of holdings in distressed areas should be much bigger,' he said. Swaminathan said farmers in irrigated areas who used advanced methods had access to credit much in excess to what farmers in distressed areas were able to garner. Budget can't be challenged in court: SC Even before the applause for a Budget
The discussion on the President's address got off to a confrontationist and bitter start in Lok Sabha on Monday with NDA and UPA benches repeatedly interrupting each other even as Leader of Opposition L K Advani called on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to reveal how the mega loan waiver would be funded. Advani said while a relief package for farmers was welcome, it was incumbent on government to tell Parliament how it intended to compensate banks and cooperatives for the Rs 60,000 crore sop. "Will this be by way of bonds that will be redeemed later?' he asked. He also pointed out that rural distress had been aggravated by price rise. The Radhakrishnan report on indebtedness said that there were a range of factors that were adding to the farmers' burden. Many farmers who were facing a debt trap had borrowed heavily from private money lenders. He sought to link the waiver with the possibility of an early election and said "since last August there has been uncertainty' referring to Congress-Left brinksmanship over the India-US nuclear deal. He said an unstable government could not deliver. Advani was interrupted with Congress MPs questioning him on issues like the record on combatting terror and BJP's position on Telangana. The heckling seemed part of a pre-planned script. Congress chief Sonia Gandhi's decision to sit on the last bench during the debate seemed to encourage her MPs who competed with one another in aggressively defending the party. The loan waiver issue also had an echo in Rajya Sabha with BJP and CPM charging the Centre with not addressing the real concerns of the poor. Participating in the discussion on the motion of thanks, Abhishek Singhvi (Congress) said the economy had grown by over 8% in the last four years. "But this gung-ho spirit has to be tempered' in the face of hard reality of 25% people still living below the poverty line.
Delivering the Third Sumitra Chishti Memorial Lecture here on Monday, The Hindu Rural Affairs Editor, P. Sainath, methodically demolished the "historical and unprecedented' Union budgetary farmer loan waiver stating that the worst affected farmers were rendered ineligible as they possessed more than the stipulated two hectare land holdings. "In Vidharbha, over 50 per cent of land holdings are over 7.5 acres [around 3 hectares] and of the remaining 50 per cent, 25 per cent have restricted access to banks. There is nothing in the budget that increases the income of farmers or stabilises prices,' he said. Agrarian crisis Speaking on the agrarian crisis, the Magsaysay Award winner said over 1.5 lakh farmers had committed suicide in the past five years. A farmer killed himself every 30 minutes and the number of such suicides had increased from 15,000 a year between 1997 and 2001 to 17,000 a year in the 2002-06 period. "Just like each case of child labour has a personal history behind it, every farmer suicide had a multiplicity of causes. But the larger canvas or backdrop that leads to such suicides is common and stems from certain undeniable causes.' Enumerating these causative factors, Mr. Sainath said there had been a transfer of funds from the poor to the rich, an unprecedented growth of the corporate sector and gross undermining of local sovereignty and governance. "Farming has been rendered so unviable at the small-scale level that there are not many takers for it and the relentless drive towards corporate farming has just hastened the demise of the small farm not just in India but the world over,' said the eminent journalist.
Even before the applause for a Budget
No one asks the farmerBringing up babus With its Rs 600 billion farm loan waiver in the current budget, the government has applied some band aid to the financial haemorrhaging of India's farmers. It is another matter that the hurt is at some other place. The farmer has difficulty in obtaining cheap and reliable credit; various laws prevent him from selling his produce at the most competitive prices in the open market; there is no reliable advice available to him on how best to tend his fields in an economical manner; existing farming techniques, guided by corporate interests, continue to suck life out of the soil without replenishing it and there is no system of health security in the villages. On all these counts, the government has yet to show even minimal movement. The farm loan waiver gives the impression that farmers do not wish to repay their loans. This is a serious misrepresentation of the ground reality. According to figures from the NABARD, only some 10 per cent of the farmers default on bank loans. And even then, it is rarely that farming assets are taken away by the banks for failure to pay back loans. The problem for farmers lies in the loans taken from informal sources: moneylender and relatives. Often, the moneylender himself is a prosperous neighbourhood farmer. He gives large loans that are beyond the paying capacity of the borrower. These loans come with exorbitant rates of interest and severe penalties for default. The lender here does not falter in taking away farming assets, including land. After all, this could be a strategy for acquiring more land for himself. The advice of the agriculture minister a few days ago at Mumbai that farmers need not pay back loans taken from
BUDGET 2008-09 IMPACT The Rs 60,000 crore loan waiver for farmers announced in this year's Budget is being projected as a major achievement of Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar in his stronghold and sugar cane country western Maharashtra. The minister has unleashed a blitzkrieg of advertisements of his Nationalist Congress Party, addressing sugar cane farmers there. On the other hand, Congress leaders in the party stronghold of Vidarbha are on the defensive, even as farmer groups are openly saying that Pawar engineered the package to weaken the Congress in Vidarbha. The political sub-plot to the waiver has once again added to the agony of the dryland farmers who were earlier denied a waiver when the prime minister announced a relief package. The waiver benefits sugar cane and horticulture crops vastly, while the benefits for cotton farmers and those doing unirrigated farming are minimal. For, while loan available for dryland farming is Rs 4,000 an acre, it is Rs 50,000 for irrigated farming, which sugar cane farmers do. Hence the waiver will be a lottery for farmers in western Maharashtra and in Pawar's constituency of Baramati. The advertisements seek to drive the point home. The full page advertisements appearing in Marathi newspapers on March 1, with several pictures of Pawar, trumpet home the fact that the waiver is meant to benefit the sugar cane and horticulture farmers of western Maharashtra rather than the cotton farmers of Vidarbha. Pawar's advertisements in newspaper Sakal's Nagpur edition, for instance, talk about how loans for tractors will be waived. The advertisements in Lokmat and Tarun Bharat, which appeared on March 1, also splashed Pawar's picture and highlighted the waiver saying that loans for pipes, wells, tractors and buying of cattle would be waived. The Sakal advertisement, which says
MOUNDHALA (BULDANA): His clothes remind me of him,' wails Leelabai, clutching a bundle of clothes in front of the dilapidated structure she calls home, as younger sister Kalabai wipes away her tears
India and the world population has doubled or tripled since the World War II. The world and India produces seven times more food than 60 or more years ago when many nations were in a shambles and farms were marred by mines and other hazardous chemicals in the aftermath of millions killed by bombs and gun battles, though not India, which was not a big theatre of war, but of the war of Independence. Imperial rulers were preoccupied with German and Japanese invaders and with conquering them. India was the fodder of the war machine with 2.5 million soldiers to fight on every front to defeat the Axis power. The war had seen the Bengal Famine with tens of thousands dying of hunger, but official records called it malnutrition, not starvation. That was the Imperial nomenclature, valid ever since until today. Yet in the bygone 20th century we have seen great strides, we have seen great visible progress in pursuit of Mahatma Gandhi's goal of wiping every tear from every Indian face. Irrigation dams by the score have been built and dry farms have had irrigation canals and channels supplying life-giving water. Where canals could not reach hand pumps or powered pumps have been installed to irrigate farms. Punjab, Haryana, western UP and many other States prospered, but not all areas. From 30 million tons of grain, India today produces as much as 210 million tons. For a long time, India was supposed to be self sufficient, not needing to import any grain, though for some years now, as part of the policy of food security a buffer stock has been built and wheat and rice have been imported. Sometimes exotic basmati rice has been exported and cheaper and large quantities of cheaper imported to try and feed Indians, but the exercise has not fully succeeded. In spite of the great Indian success story, when India's economy is one of the fastest growing at a clip of nine per cent per year why do we in free India, 40 per cent of us remain below the poverty line, sleep on an empty stomach, why 42 per cent of all children starve or are very poorly fed? Yet, literacy and education are fundamental rights, food is not. There are no free lunches, though midday school feeding programmes are much in place, yet honored more in the breach than in the observance, because 80 per cent of the money provided must be and is known to be siphoned off by the time it reaches the panchayat or the village or the city school into the pockets of all kinds of people, be they suppliers, petty or senior officials and politicians, down now to the village panch, leave alone the sarpanch. Is that the way of the Third World, if not all world, because corruption in the First Word is far more sophisticated; it runs into millions and billions of dollars, not in peanuts or a few rupees, hundreds or thousands of them. Such is the system, like it or not? Is that why 30 per cent growth some areas of the services sector and nine per cent overall, farm or grain production grows only at 2.6 per cent and in years of monsoon failure or excess of it, the growth is what in modern parlance is sophisticated jugglery of world negative as nobody wants to speak the truth that output has gone down or dropped. Management and official jargon has taken a new leap in falsehood and lies as truth is totally at a discount and invention and magic with words is the norm. That is Harvard or management school education, push the dirt under the rug, don't allow it to be exposed. Thanks to multinational producers and sellers of genetically modified seeds or biotechnology, salesmen push the hybrid seeds for well irrigated farms to grow more cotton whereas rainfed farms can take only ordinary seeds, cheaper and ten times costlier. At the time when farmers in Nagpur or Vidharbha and Andhra should be reaping a big crop, they find zero shoots. They have borrowed money to buy this costly seeds. They are deep in debt, of principal and interest. They have been cheated. Since they cannot afford to pay, the moneylender knocks at their men with musclemen in tow, throws them out of their hearth and home and occupies their parched farm. What does the poor farmer do now? He takes his life, next members of his family start doing the same. Thousands of farmers have been doing so for some decades now, although heartless money lenders have been doing this for centuries gone by. That is the story of Indian village, village after village. Now that a general election is less than 15 months away to choose a new Lok Sabha and three States in the north east are in the process to elect legislatures and six more States will do so before the end of the year or early next year, the Government is engaged in double quick time to line up doles for the voters, especially for the farmers, who are the backbone of a democracy, who hold the maximum number of cards. The magicians that the Prime Minister, his Finance Minister, and their boss, the Chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance are, have ordained that Rs.32,000 crores of buoyant government revenues must be dispensed with as debt relief to farmers to woo them for the grand old party. This is less than ten per cent of the bank loans of Rs.3,42,000 crores the farmers owe to the banks, but it is the government which will reimburse them so that they can balance their books and prudential banking does not receive a jolt. But the farmers at the mercy of private money lenders who charge 2 to 3 per cent are unlikely to benefit. Will they continue to die and starve as before? Only time will tell. God save them, for who else can? Lalit Sethi, NPA
