Conflicts

The critics of the PMRDFS have already started asking questions as follows:

Guest post by: Raju Mimi

Article and Video Courtesy : Association for India's Development - Johns Hopkins University

Author : Nishikant

Author : Kotikala Chandrasheakar

Name of the watershed: Ayyannapalem
Name of the Mandal: Bollapalli
District: Guntur

Article and Image Courtesy : One World South Asia

Author : Madhusmita Hazarika

Organization: Rashtriya Jan Sansad / National People's Parliament

Description:
India, our country, is today at the crossroads. Despite our intense and diverse human, natural, cultural and technological resources the Constitutional endowments of freedom, equity and justice appear to be a distant dream. On the one side a small group of people have never had it so good with top class infrastructure, privately run airports, relatively cheap air travel, fast moving cars, obscenely high salaries and the promise of a 9 % growth. On the other side the conditions of the majority continue to deteriorate: farmers' suicides; large scale displacements; the use of police and para-military forces to appropriate Adivasi lands, forests and resources and and resistance to this faced with brutality and murder; dis-employment of the urban poor due to infrastructure projects; mega corruption scandals in every development project. But of course this is of no interest to the media! Corruption in its current form seems to be so institutionalised in character and monstrous in proportion as to make past scandals look like petty deeds. Are these stories of some other land or of our own?

Close to 30 hydroelectric projects are being planned on the Teesta and its tributaries. Not only is this river an essential part of Lepcha identity and life, but it also flows through a fragile zone. In this article first published in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), Kanchi Kohli examines the ramifications of this policy.

This has been a generic first attempt that can be fine-tuned and customised for each type of ecosystem and each kind of service value. Ecosystem services are defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment as ‘the benefits people obtain from ecosystems'.

Mountains occupy 24% of the global land surface area and are home to 12% of the world’s population. Mountains have an ecological, aesthetic, and socioeconomic significance, not only for those living in the mountain areas, but also for people living beyond them. However, the importance of ecosystem services arising from mountains is not properly recognised. The HKH region is endowed with a rich variety of gene pools and species, and ecosystems of global importance. It is a storehouse of biological diversity and a priority region in many global conservation agendas. The region has many unique ecosystems that play a critical role in protecting the environment and in providing livelihoods for much of Asia and beyond.