The farmers in Madhya Pradesh are feeling devastated and over a half-a-dozen of them have even committed suicide in a short span of time in different parts of the state.   In the last one month, farmers have committed suicide in villages across Bhopal, Sehore, Chhindwara, Damoh, and Sagar districts. The farmers’ plight had surfaced in a big way when thousands of farmers under the banner of Bharatiya Kisan Sangh had converged...

At the Cancun climate change conference in December 2010, Jairam Ramesh, Union minister for environment and forests, raised the white flag of surrender when, departing from the prepared text, he declared, “all countries, we believe, must take on binding commitments under appropriate legal forms”. The minister thus signalled that India will give in to pressures from developed countries to convert its voluntary, nationally-determined mitigation actions into internationally-binding commitments in an...

Chhattisgarh tribals punished for exercising rights under Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act It was unconstitutional, violation of PESA, says petition It was pushed by local administration, politicians to set up thermal power plant One morning in March 2010, residents of Premnagar awoke to discover they were villagers no more. An administrative notification had dissolved Premnagar's village council or gram panchayat and replaced it with a city council or nagar panchayat. Unbeknownst to...

India's environment ministry has ordered the demolition of a block of flats in Mumbai that has been at the centre of a corruption scandal. It said the Adarsh Society building must be demolished within three months for breaching coastal protection laws. The 31-storey high-rise was originally planned as a six-storey housing project for war widows. But flats were sold to politicians and military officers, allegedly at prices far below the market rate. The block,...

The National Fishermen's Federation (NFF) has expressed displeasure over the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification (CRZ), 2011, in its present form, and accused Union Minister of Environment and Forests (MoEF) Jairam Ramesh of having taken the organisation for a ride by not incorporating some of the provisions that had been agreed upon in the talks between the Ministry and NFF representatives ahead of the notification. Matanhy Saldanha, chairman of the NFF, on...