Judgment of the Supreme Court in the matter of In Re: Zudpi Jungle Lands. A batch of applications involved a peculiar issue concerning the situation prevailing in the six districts of eastern Vidarbha region namely Nagpur, Wardha, Bhandara, Gondia, Chandrapur and Gadchiroli. The issue pertains to the status of the …
No, no and no again. At a meeting organised by Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (cse) on July 7, environmentalists firmly rejected the proposal of the ministry of environment and forests (mef) to virtually lease out degraded forest lands to industry for captive plantations. The cse meeting brought together …
NO entry for agni (fire) here. This was the message the villagers of Patial, in Punjab's Hoshiarpur district, had for the fire-ravaged hills of neighbouring Himachal and Uttar Pradesh. Its very own fire brigade, tempered by decades of fire prevention rather than fighting, ensured that the Patial forests remained unscathed. …
The Chilean government is in the line of fire. It is being accused by local environmentalist groups of hold- ing up a private project aimed to save a vast tract of the virgin rainforests, only to ensure the well-being of the nation's flourishing timber and salmon companies, who are exploiting …
Nepal has become the first country to implement the concept of community forest use effectively, by assembling its grassroot forces, especially the rural women. The first Regional Community Forestry Users' Group Workshop was inaugurated by Salim Miya Ansari, state minister for forests and soil Conservation on May 23, at the …
ETHICS is a relatively unheard of issue in the field of international environmental politics. This is troubling because the ethical angle explains the dynamics of transnational environmental affairs. The silence on the subject of justice is mainly because of the intellectual traditions of international relations, ie, realism and liberalism. A …
Language errors can definitely pose problems, as villagers of 5 districts in the Vidharbha region of Maharashtra will testify. The misinterpretation of 2 Marathi words Zudpi Jungle in the records of the revenue and forest departments of the Maharashtra government -- resulting in their incongruous use in the amended Forest …
THE Union Cabinet is masticating over a proposal to allow the Indian paper industry to maintain plantations on degraded forests in India. The process is expected to accelerate although several Union ministers have reservations about anticipated protests by ngos and forest-based communities, especially in view of the Parliamentary elections due …
The salient features of the new government scheme which would allow paper plantations to stay on degraded forests are: • The selection of the project area shall be done jointly by the forest department, Forest Development Corporations (FDC), and the industries/entrepreneurs. Only degraded forests of less than 10 per cent …
The pampered paper industry in India is being given another sop. It has consistently lobbied for captive plantations in the country's forest tracts. Success, it seems, is at hand because the Indian government is actively considering such a scheme, ignoring the gross injustice explicit in this demand. On the face …
The area under forest cover in India has been a subject of controversy and intense debate between the Forest Department anf the environmental groups and researchers. As more and more remote sensing data became available even in Forest Survey of India statistics the forest cover started shrinking considerably. This books …
Asunati Khonara, 65 of village Prapamunda, a mother of 4, is a Kond adivasi woman. With the establishment of NIPDIT in 1982, she became the animator of the Dadaki Cluster Level Organisation. She has been the vital force behind the people of 16 villages giving up shifting cultivation and going …
How does one form ones own identity and how does this identity affect our attitude and the societies attitude towards people? It is this aspect of mind and images that is dealt with in this video. As in one of its earlier videos, the TISS uses examples from the advertising …
Nonsense! most people said, when they heard that the breweries at Pozhiyoor are going to shut down. It seemed an impossibility, for the town had earned notoreity as Kerala's illicit-liqour Capital. However, when they actually did so 3 years ago, a large question opened up : how to survive? The …
Is consciousness unique to us or are animals also conscious of their existence? In her latest book Through Our Eyes Only? Mario Stamp Dawkins, a lecturer at Oxford University, makes a careful case for the conscious chicken, marshalling evidence from years of research into the way chickens behave. Her main …
The forest department's dismal performance is in sharp contrast to the signal service rendered by a voluntary organisation, the Radhasoami Satsang. The people in the forest villages here had been settled by the British at the turn of the century to work on felling trees. They were allowed to cultivate …
It was a blazing mid-March afternoon in Ahwa, 130 km from Surat. Some "modern" men were enacting what seemed for all practical purposes a medieval drama. The lawns of the Ahwa collectorate, the headquarters of the Dangs district, were suitably decorated. The local maibaaps (virtual satraps) -- the district"s bureaucrats …
According to David Hardiman, a historian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, the Bhils came to the Dangs around the 14th century, almost simultaneously with the Konkanas, who were initially subjects of the Bhils. The Konkanas practiced rab cultivation in the flatter regions of the valleys. Forest …
The Dang durbar (court) that opened this year on March 13, and continued till Holi (March 17) is an annual pageantry coming down from the Raj days. What actually happens here clearly symbolises the plains-people's and the bureacracy's patronising, condescending, yet authoritarian attitude towards forest tribals. The Dangs durbar dates …
It is an anomaly: the privy purse was abolished 24 years ago, yet, here, in the Dangs, they still exist. The British ruled in the Dangs under the foreign territories regulations. In 1947 it acceeded to India by default. So when the privy was abolished for the former states, the …
In the pre-British era, the Dangis, part of a larger trade circle in forest products, dictated the terms of trade in forest produce. Merchants from the peripheral towns, bought permission to cut timber from the Bhil chiefs. The rate, in 1826, was Rs.2.25 per cart. Payments were often in kind, …
