-The Times of India Post Kathua, these nomadic people are struggling to protect their daughters, as well as their rights over open pastures Bashir Hussain worries constantly for his five-year-old daughter Najma, ever since the horrific gang-rape and murder in Kathua. “What will I do if something happens to her? What happened to the eight-year-old Bakerwal girl could happen only because we have no rights over forests and pastures in this state....

-Scroll.in It is important that forest policies are formulated through a gender-sensitive lens and that women are included in the conversation. A few weeks ago, when Google India marked the 45th anniversary of the Chipko movement with a doodle, it was a refreshing flashback to forest communities sacrificing their lives to protect trees from being felled for timber use. One of the first such recorded community protests was at Khejarli village in...

-TheWire.in Our progress in conserving natural heritage, environmental stability and ecosystem services is measured solely through the lens of tree cover. It shouldn't. India’s non-forest ecosystems are biting the dust in the absence of a holistic conservation policy. In place of the latter, we have a new National Forest Policy that outlines the use of forests in legally binding terms. First drafted by the British to maximise timber production, this policy was revised...

-Groundxero.in India’s forests are officially on sale. Forests, which are ecological and cultural constructs intrinsically linked with human communities that have been living in and using those for ages, have turned into mere repositories of ‘products’ such as timber and ‘ecosystem services’ that could be quantified, valued, priced and exchanged—or so the Draft National Forest Policy prepared by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change(MoEF & CC) would have us...

-Livemint.com The current National Forest Policy dates back to 1988 before India’s economic liberalization started and now the government wants a revision, as it perceives a decline in corporate investments into the forest sector New Delhi: Imagine two scenarios. One is a natural forest, nature’s complex multi-layered ecosystem and a landscaped home to 80% of all terrestrial biodiversity where thousands of species of plants, animals and microorganisms interact and thrive. The second...