-Newslaundry.com The election season seems to have skipped Adivasis in the state that has recorded 19 deaths from starvation since 2017. On New Year’s Eve, Baghiya Birijiya lost her mother Budhni Birijiyan to hunger, cold, and extreme poverty in Latehar, one of India’s poorest districts. The family had so few means that they could not cremate the 80-year-old’s body for two days, until public pressure led the administration to intervene to provide...

-The Hindu It is shocking that a democratic government is seeking to strengthen the colonial-era Indian Forest Act The Indian Forest Act, 1927 was a remarkable piece of expropriation in the name of conservation. The British government carried out one of the largest land expropriations in history, where the rights to occupy and use forests were transferred from communities with customary and historical property rights to the colonial Central government. The act...

-The Hindu It is tragic that ‘New India’ chooses to attack Adivasis and forest-dwellers instead of those destroying its ecology When the tsunami hit the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in 2004, thousands perished. However, some of the oldest Adivasi tribes, the Jarawas and the Onges, lost nobody. These communities followed animals to the highlands well before the waves hit. Formal education was of little survival value in a context where you needed...

-The Hindu Sabotaging the Forest Rights Act damages democracy Since 1980, through the Forest Conservation Act (FCA), the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF) has “diverted for non-forest use” (bureaucratese for destroyed) over 1.5 million hectares of forest. How many Adivasis and forest-dwellers have been evicted by this ‘lawful’ forest destruction? Stripping these forests has yielded thousands of crores of rupees for corporations to which a bulk of these forestlands...

-TheWire.in Issues tied to forest governance require a collaborative approach rather than narrow court action on the Forest Rights Act. The Supreme Court order related to the “eviction” of tribal and forest-dwelling communities has made big news. The February 13 order directing state governments to initiate action against all those with “rejected” claims has reignited longstanding ideological disputes over India’s forest governance. Reactions to the recent order in a case filed by Wildlife...