In essence, the notion of benefit sharing is recognition of the natural rights of affected communities over mineral resources in their traditional and historical homelands. Communities have a right to benefit first—culturally, economically and politically. These rights can be seen from the prism of both immediate as well as long-term …
The persistence of colonial patterns of ownership of plantations in Kerala remains one of the enduring weaknesses of the land reforms programme of the 1970s in the state. The case of Chengara
The paper presents the socioeconomic profile of the people around proposed mining areas of Mahanadi Coalfields Limited at Talcher and Ib valley coal mine areas to generate base line data for future intervention. The Quality Of Life (QOL) has also been indexed in a 0-10 point scale based on some …
The Bundelkhand region of India is a semi-arid plateau, which consists of twelve districts of northern Madhya Pradesh and five districts of southern Uttar Pradesh. The region suffers from severe ecological degradation induced primarily by the factors such as soil degradation and deforestation. Temporary and long-term migration of villagers from …
India's states have employed several land reform measures, including reforming tenancy, imposing land ceilings, distributing government wasteland, and allocating house sites and homestead plots. With relatively modest revisions, some of the existing laws and policies can further their original intent of increasing the poor's access to rural land and providing …
In the past, research on land distribution in rural India has pointed out that the surveys by the National Sample Survey Organisation have yielded underestimates of the extent of land inequality and landlessness. In a fresh analysis, this paper, using household level data from the 48th and 59th rounds (1992 …
The national economy is growing at near double-digit rates but neither industry nor non-agricultural activities in rural India have been able to provide livelihoods for millions of rural workers. It is this failure that underlies the spurt in rural violence that has highlighted once again the issue of the poor's …
Public discourse on the Singur imbroglio by and large revolves around how many landholders have handed over, or not handed over, their land to the government for the proposed Tata motorcar factory. It is as if the number of landowners is the sole indicator of the extent of
The Punjab government has revived the green tractor scheme under which Rs 01 million will be given as subsidy to the small farmers for the purchase of a tractor. The government has allocated Rs 1 billion to provide subsidy on purchase of 10,000 green tractors in the 2008-09 budget. Only …
The report of the expert group (EG) on "Development Issues to Deal with the Causes of Discontent, Unrest and Extremism' associated with the Naxalite movement, set up by the Planning Commission two years ago, has the merit of making the relevant issues visible in an official milieu blinded by a …
Land alienation, poverty amongst scheduled tribes and dalits and lack of access to basic forest resources have contributed to the growth of naxalism, says the Planning Commission. Its report, Development challenges in extremist affected areas, indicts Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh. The report also critiques sezs and the complete failure of …
Govt takes up 3-year monga mitigation plan Model to employ 67pc farm workers in lean period Obaidul Ghani The government has taken a three-year action plan from this year to increase crop productions in the northern districts, where about 37.50 lakh people are exposed to extreme poverty due to seasonal …
Starvation deaths are headline grabbers. But when an entire community lives on the brink of starvation through out the year it rarely merits a mention. One such group, the Musahars in Uttar Pradesh light their chula once a day, in the evening, and live on one meal. Dec 2007
The Kerala government filed an affidavit in the high court seeking to extend by three months the court's deadline to evict encroachers in Chengara in South Kerala. Landless people had forcibly occupied a rubber estate there. The court had asked the administration to remove the encroachers without using force. But …
SEVERAL hundred landless people formed a human chain on the premises of Raiganj upazila council in Sirajganj Tuesday to press home their demands, including eviction of land grabbers. The demands include eviction of
uncertainty continues in Chengara village in south Kerala's Pathanamthitta district where about 10,000 landless people forcibly settled in a rubber plantation in August 2007. The settlers, mostly dalits and tribal people, say that the government's indifference to their repeated demands for land triggered the current struggle. "Land to landless adivasis …
Big, bigger Almost a third of the entire Nagpur district, that is 3,780 sq km, will be brought under the metropolitan region. Of this 1,520 sq km will be taken up under the first phase of development. About 70 per cent of this is agricultural land. The plan to expand …
From the highway the gravestones were visible. Thirteen headstones, rough and blunt, carved with names of each dead tribal. Each stone was placed so that together they formed a semi-circle looking down at us. In front of the 13-stone platform was a fenced area with scattered burnt sticks lying as …
A little over a year before the Janadesh march, a working group appointed by the Planning Commission had termed land reforms in India a "forgotten agenda'. It minced no words in explaining why. "Policy makers are finding existing land reforms enacted on the basis of central guidelines of early seventies …
Faced with 25,000 landless people from across the country marching up to parliament on October 29 to register their protest, the United Progressive Alliance (upa) government announced the creation of a committee on "State Agrarian Relations and the Unfinished Task in Land Reforms'. The union minister of rural development, Raghuvansh …
the government announced the new National Policy on Resettlement and Rehabilitation (nprr) 2007 on October 11. Though it heralded the policy as ground-breaking, a closer look reveals gaping holes, which may make it less than just for the displaced. For example, the new policy does not define
