Reply affidavit on behalf of the Central Ground Water Board in the matter of Suo Moto case titled "Haryana 60.48% groundwater over exploited Kurukshetra worst Jhajjar best says" appearing in the Tribune, January 8, 2025. The CGWA report, May 3, 2025 addresses the issue of groundwater exploitation and violation of …
Benefit-sharing with project-affected communities may soon become a reality in the Indian mining industry. A new Mines Bill that provides for profit and royalty sharing by mining companies with project-affected people was introduced in the Lok Sabha on Monday. The mining industry, which has been opposing such a provision, may …
India sought to allay Bangladesh's concerns over the Tipaimukh project as two advisers to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina yesterday met the Indian ministers for water resources and power, and the National Security Adviser in New Delhi. Hasina's advisers Gowher Rizvi and Mashiur Rahman are in the Indian capital as part …
Climate change mitigation projects in developing countries have the potential for significant negative impacts on land users. In particular, land users with socially legitimate but informal tenure that is not recorded using a statutory process are at risk of exploitation from the powerful elite. A detailed understanding of de facto …
In light of the adoption of the Nagoya Protocol, it is important for countries that have or are in the process of putting in place national ABS measures to share their experiences in implementation. Drawing upon practical experience with ABS will greatly assist in highlighting where regulatory gaps exist, what …
This briefing gives an overview of the key REDD+ issues, in particular: integrating mitigation and adaptation actions; addressing tenure; learning from participatory forest management and payment for ecosystems services; taking the right approach to gender; developing safeguards to minimize negative impacts of REDD+; and strengthening South-South collaboration to reduce the …
Ensuring that the poor or the most vulnerable sections of society benefit from REDD+ projects is crucial to building both national and international legitimacy and to fostering successful delivery of conservation and social objectives. In both academic and non-academic literature, issues of the equity of benefit-sharing at a community or …
The coal ministry has written to finance minister Pranab Mukherjee to make coal block owners share 26 per cent of their net profits under the newly drafted Mines and Minerals (Development & Regulation) Bill. In a letter, dated October 8, to Mukherjee, who till recently headed the Group of Ministers …
Next year, in June, world leaders will get together in the joyful city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to mark 20 years of UNCED—the Earth Summit (see Down to Earth, May 15, 1992). Unbelievably, it will be 40 years since the Stockholm conference, when the question of the environment first …
Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act was enacted 15 years ago. Do you feel helpless because it has not yet been implemented? As the minister of panchayati raj, my first job is to remind people about the existence of PESA. If need arises I can go for further legislation …
The Indian cabinet Friday approved the draft of a law that seeks to attract investments in mining by simplifying rules and smoothening land acquisitions through higher compensation to people displaced, but industry executives said some of the proposals were negative. Inadequate compensation and the fear of loss of livelihood have …
Egypt and Ethiopia have agreed to set up a technical team to review the impact of a $4.8-billion Nile river dam which Addis Ababa announced in March, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said in Cairo on Saturday. Egypt has been worried over changes to colonial-era treaties since Nile basin nations, …
Some 40 years ago an experiment began in Arabari forest range of West Bengal that caught the fancy of the nation. The forest authorities roped in the people living in the area in regenerating degraded forests. In return they offered them a share in forest resources and revenue. It worked. …
Madhya Pradesh set out on a generous note. The state’s 1990 JFM resolution promised 20 per cent of the net profit from the felling of timber to forest protection committees in case of dense forest and 30 per cent of the net profit in the case of degraded forests. In …
Harvest time has come and gone but the residents of Sitarampeth village in Chandrapur district did not get a penny in return for protecting nearly 300 ha of reserve forest for over a decade. “No valuation has ever been done of the work done by us,” says Rambhau Dhande, a …
Andhra Pradesh is the only state that claims to have calculated exact timber and bamboo revenue shares transferred to communities under JFM. The World Bank funded the programme with generous loans of Rs 1,000 crore for 15 years till March 2009. Benefits shared are impressive. According to the World Bank’s …
The concept of JFM is alluring enough to keep people engaged in conservation for years. But when it comes to sharing the fruits it is a practical joke. For every hundred rupees earned from timber sale a JFM committee usually gets only Rs 17.5 in cash, thanks to the forest …
Forest departments across the country owe millions of rupees to communities. For 20 years communities toiled under the Joint Forest Management programme in the hope of getting shares in revenue from timber and bamboo sales. As forests mature for harvesting, forest departments apply mathematical tricks to bring down monetary share …
THE Jharkhand government has announced it will give 80 per cent of the amount collected from auction of sand mines in the state to block panchayats. This is the first time a state has decided to share business profits with local bodies. Hemant Soren, deputy chief minister and minister in-charge …
State to give 80 per cent of sand mine auction profit to panchayats THE Jharkhand government has announced it will give 80 per cent of the amount collected from auction of sand mines in the state to block panchayats. This is the first time a state has decided to share …
There is growing support for characterizing ecosystem services in order to link conservation and human well-being. However, few studies have explicitly included ecosystem services within systematic conservation planning, and those that have follow two fundamentally different approaches: ecosystem services as intrinsically-important targeted benefits vs. substitutable co-benefits. We present a first …
