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 …
Sainj Hydro Electric project would require land some of which is being acquired form private persons. The construction of the project will also involve under ground works, transportation of large quantities of material, more than usual activity in the area and therefore, all this is likely to have an impact …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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
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 …
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 …
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
On August 28, senior police officers and forest department personnel of two contiguous districts in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka held a joint meeting to combat the growing Naxal presence in forest areas. Erode in Tamil Nadu, one of the two districts in question, had not far back been the hunting …
the draft Resettlement and Rehabilitation Policy has hit a roadblock for the second time. The group of ministers (gom) debated the draft policy brought out by the Union ministry of rural development (mord) on July 3, after failing to reach consensus the first time on June 20. The problem areas …
