-Livemint.com The National Forest Policy will be an overarching policy for forest management, with the aim of bringing a minimum of one-third of India’s total geographical area under forest or tree cover New Delhi: India’s environment ministry has unveiled a draft of the new National Forest Policy (NFP) that proposes to restrict “schemes and projects which interfere with forests that cover steep slopes, catchments of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, geologically unstable terrain...

-The Indian Express The demand is a call for upholding local practices of belonging On March 12, about 50,000 farmers reached Mumbai, walking 165 km in the hope that their elected representatives would listen when they spoke. A majority of these farmers were Adivasis and one of their demands was the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) and through it, their land rights. The FRA was enacted in 2006 with the...

-The Indian Express Forest Rights Act is not an obstacle to growth. Its non-implementation will be politically counter-productive. The farmers’ and forest dwellers’ march from Nashik to Mumbai, and the Maharashtra government’s decision to approve most of their demands within the next six months, has established the fact that land and forest rights are going to be determining factors for political establishments across India. The protest in Mumbai tells us that a...

-PTI Mumbai: Farmers have "reclaimed" 125 acres in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar district, claiming that bank fraud accused Nirav Modi had acquired their plots at prices below the market rate. A group of over 200 farmers, who arrived in bullock carts at Khandala in Karjat tehsil, symbolically reoccupied the land, ploughing a part of it using a tractor. The farmers said they would start cultivation on the entire tract soon. They said the plots had...

-The Hindu Business Line Eleven years since its inception, the State’s farmer’s debt relief commission has quietly eased the burden of debt on poor farmers, and grown to be a model worth emulating Earlier this week 35,000 debt-ridden farmers coursed through Maharashtra, walking 180 km on blistered soles, to converge at Mumbai’s Azad Maidan demanding freedom from debt and fair compensation for their produce. As the government scrounged for solutions, it could’ve...