A collection of documents from Britain’s colonial past are to be made public for the first time through the UK’s National Archives. The files were sent to the UK from various former territories, mostly at the time they achieved independence. The documents emerged when four people who had participated in …
“This magazine is not a product of a desire to capture share of the information market. It is a product of a need and desire to fill a critical information gap.” Anil Agarwal, founding editor of Down To Earth, wrote this in his introduction to the launch of the fortnightly …
THE “about us” section of http://mother-earth-journal. com describes it rather modestly as a citizen journalist project in the US. The content on the site can scarcely be called modest. For one, a rather nononsense home page has articles on mercury toxins, a feature on the Gulf of Mexico, a year …
THE Planning Commission of India has disowned any responsibility for bringing companies involved in public-private partnership (PPP) projects under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. The Commission said individual ministries which have tied up with private companies are responsible for these projects. There were several RTI applications filed seeking information …
Who stands were As the D-day arrives and bamboo is all set to attain liberation and Mendha Lekha to become the first village in India to exercise its community right to harvest and freely sell bamboo under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) we take a look where the key players …
Red Letter Day for bamboo On April 27, Maharashtra will rewrite history. On that day, bamboo, a hugely contested product of India’s forests, will attain its liberation and Mendha Lekha in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli Latest updates from Mendha Lekha April 26: In response to forest department's opposition to giving community rights …
In 2008, the village applied for the right over 18 sq km of village forest area under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 Read full story: Give us 18 sq km In 2009, Mendha Lekha alongwith Marda village became the first villages …
Minor forest produce and forests rights Bamboo » How To Sell A Wonder Herb » Row in Madhya Pradesh » SCANDAL WOOD » Scheme for tribalfolk » Access granted » Nepal's poor carry it off » Phulmai's walk - a day in the life of a headloader » Super Market …
Imagine being able to access a book anywhere in the world. And not just books but documents, treaties and papers on any subject, in any language, in any corner of the world—all at the click of the mouse. That may be the ultimate fantasy of the bibliophile, the scholar, the …
In 1948, a young mathematician published a paper in an obscure technical journal. For Claude Shanon, the mathematician in question, communication was purely a matter of sending a message composed of what he called bits over a noisy channel so that someone else could recover it. Whether the message was …
UNTIL recently, no system of power seemed more invincible than corporate media. A century ago, industrialisation handed a monopoly of mass communication to a tiny elite with the money to buy and run printing presses and, later, TV studios. Yet through a further twist of technological fate, the digital revolution …
I suspect Indian scientists have retired hurt to the pavilion. They were exposed to nasty public scrutiny on a deal made by a premier science research establishment, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), with Devas, a private company, on the allocation of spectrum. The public’s verdict was that the arrangement was …
Ideas and ideologies, images and reports of events, both minor and cataclysmic, fly on the Internet, swirling through cyberspace, gathering resonance, metamorphosing and touching millions of lives in different ways. Many of the ideas—and visuals—could be banal (as they very often are), some dangerous, others bringing promise of change. Some …
Our world is increasingly held together by the network of digital communications networks we call the Internet. Business, government, politics, science and the arts have all been fundamentally transformed by the fact that everyone’s connected to everyone else, everywhere, and no one needs to get permission to collaborate, trade, or …
Chhattisgarh’s tribal population is beginning to get a taste of free press. They have a news service that informs them about events that concern them but rarely find mention in the mainstream media because of the state’s Special Public Security Act of 2005. The law operates as a gag order …
After the WikiLeak revelation, cyber activists went to town claiming the disclosures as another indicator of internet-fostered democracy. Within days Western governments and their friends in the cyberworld clamped down on WikiLeaks. The not-so-thinly-veiled attacks on the whistle-blowing site and its charismatic founder, Julian Assange, by Western governments was covertly …
The Tata group has taken offence to some media outfits’ coverage of the 2G scam. It has barred its companies from responding to reporters from publications and television channels, including Open, Pioneer and Outlook, and those that are part of the India Today Group and Bennett, Coleman and Co Ltd. …
Until the second week of January, Stony Stratford, a small town in north Buckinghamshire in the UK, was famous only because its two pubs, The Cock and The Bull. They were the likely origin of the phrase “a cock and bull story”. Now it’s in news for another reason. Its …
It’s been mayhem and murder on the web with the US government and the McCarthy-like Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, getting websites to pull the plug on WikiLeaks. Not all of what they did was sane or even legal. First, Lieberman, or the Obama administration …
