Equity

Nestled in the north Kashmir region is Wular lake, India’s largest freshwater lake or wetland.

Three farm-related Bills were recently passed in the Parliament by the BJP led government at the Center, which have subsequently received presidential assent.

How have watershed development projects fared in India? Have they helped in better distribution of benefits among the poor and marginalised? Why is it important to talk about watershed development at this juncture?

This book by Dr Eshwer Kale dwells on these questions and explores issues around social exclusion among resource-poor people in watershed development projects.

Langsymphut village in Meghalaya has ample water now. Gone are the days when the water starved village was barren with its streams dying a slow death. And that too when it is located only 22 kilometres away from Mawsynram village, known to be one of the wettest places on earth!

Evidence world over shows that small scale agricultural production does very little to deal with malnutrition and food insecurity among rural poor.

In Kerala, around half the urban population and 80% of the rural population depend on open wells on their domestic water needs. But in the last decade, the majority of observatory wells recorded an average annual decline of half a meter.

There is a disquieting hush across the world as the linkage between the planet’s health and human well-being became pronounced during the times of the pandemic. The deepening socio-economic and ecological crises caused by patterns of production and consumption are being increasingly recognised.

The pandemic and lockdown measures have had a drastic impact on a large population of poor and marginalised communities, causing loss of livelihoods and employment, food insecurity and socio-economic distress. While vulnerabilities, atrocities and injustices faced by forest communities due to forest, conservation and economic policies have increased d

In pre-colonial times, India’s forestlands were mostly under the use of the local communities. Forest policies led to centralisation in colonial times with forestland being subject to commercial over-exploitation for revenue generation purposes. This, in turn, led to land alienation of forest dwellers and an overall increase in deforestation.

Unabashed assaults by human beings on the natural ecological system have caused the coronavirus to spread in the first place.