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 …
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 …
This forest is schizophrenic...it is a forest with 2 distinct personalities. One part of it is decked up -- like the drawing room of an impoverished lord -- exhibiting all that attracts applause, and funds, from international agencies. The other part is the dark, dingy and miserable home for the …
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, …
Gandhian leader Chotubhai Nayak had dreamed that they would be the key to the tribals' prosperity, these jangal mandalis, or forest labour cooperatives. They have been a feature of the Dangs since 1948 and operated till 1960, when the Dangs district was a part of Bombay state. They were dissolved …
Forest ministers of the states and union territories of India jointly issued a declaration in Delhi on May 18 at the State Forest Minister's Conference, resolving to clear the backlog of compensatory afforestation by increasing the target for 1995-96 form 56,000 ha to 1 lakh ha. As such, the national …
THE book is an attempt to theorise the relationships between the many factors responsible for the degradation of forests. Although it does not deal with the latest developments in India in forestry - Joint Forest Management and the new, proposed Forest Act - it nevertheless provides a useful backdrop for …
THERE is a widely held view that migratory herdsmen, who are allowed to graze their stocks in the forested areas, are the prime cause of degradation. There is a constant clash between the forest department officials and the herdsmen. Bashir Khan Bakerwal is just such a herdsman. I met him …
SUCCOUR came from Rome. For the "pro-lifers" in the US -- as the members of the anti-abortion camp style themselves -- the 11th encyclical of Pope John Paul II, a 189-page pronunciation of papal wrath against abortion and euthanasia -- came at a moment when the battle for the fate …
THE verdant Nordic forests are proving a big moneyspinner for the region's large pulp and paper conglomerates, Almost all the Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian producers, together accounting for more than 36 per cent of the paper production and consumption in the European Community, have reported a huge leap in profitsfor …
Bangladesh is in the grip of a crisis, us,farmers take to the streets, block roads, snatch fertiliser'tonsignments,and even set ablaze government offices and the residences of political leaders. They are irked at the recent steep hike in fertiliser prices: a 50 kg bag ofchemical fertiliser has doubled from US $5.75 …
VILLAGLRS reading satellite images like the back of their hands: it's an absurd oxymoron. But this virtual impossibility is precisely what the Bangalore-based Actionaid team discovered in Nepal recently. The team had started with an unlikely hypothesis: that the local people, with their intimate knowledge of the vicinity's topography, would …
THE technocrats' promise to make every office paperless by the turn of the century doesn't seem to have made a dent in consumption: in the North, the per capita has shot up to an unsustainable 120-150 kg, and 0.2 to 30 kg in the Asia Pacific. Worse still, the Food …
All is well again with the lions in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. Their tribe is rapidly increasing, reassures Melody Roelk-Parker, veterinary officer of the Tanzanian national parks. Conservationists in the country were having sleepless nights as canine distemper virus cut a broad swathe last year through the lion population. In …
Spain is facing the longest ever dry patch this century. The drought spells disaster for crops. Although the Agrarian Young Farmers Association pegs drought losses at us $2.34 billion, Greenpeace believes that the total cost to the Spanish economy was twice that figure for 1994 alone. The government responded by …
The Italian ministry of foreign affairs recently organised some culture and art events. Of the exhibitions put up in Delhi, the 2 most interesting were the wooden models by Leonardo da Vinci and Nobel laureate Gugliemo Marconi, inventor of the radio. Da Vinci's wooden model depicted his vision of innovative …
