--Press release by Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) dated September 21, 2022 Over One lakh People Already Evicted in 2022. Nearly 1 Million People Faced Evictions in India in the Last Five Years. In 2021, over 36,480 houses were demolished and 2,07,106 people were forcibly evicted across India by governments – at all levels, reveals a new report by Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN). The report also finds that in...
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Minister Says New Forest Laws Don’t Dilute Tribal Rights. They Do—And Govt Planned Dilution since 2019 -Tapasya
-Article-14.com In June 2022, India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav claimed that the legal rights of millions of Indian Adivasis or tribals had not been diluted in new changes to procedures that govern how forests are given to industry. But government documents reveal that doing away with the Centre’s responsibility to verify tribal rights had been the environment ministry’s intent since 2019. New Delhi: On 28 June 2022, the union government amended India’s...
More »The debate around the Forest Conservation Rules -Jacob Koshy
-The Hindu * What are the Forest Conservation Rules and how will it affect forest dwellers and tribals? What is the government’s position on the updated rules? The story so far: The Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sparred earlier this week on the latest version of the Forest Conservation Rules. Congress spokesperson, Jairam Ramesh, alleged that the latest version of the rules, updated last month, allowed forest land to be...
More »Latest wetland mapping data underscores the need to step up conservation action -Ritesh Kumar
-India.Mongabay.com * India’s 2022 Wetlands Change Atlas mapped 231,195 wetlands, covering 4.86 percent of the country’s geographical area. The Atlas concluded that the number and extent of these wetlands have increased during the 2006/7-2017/18 period. * Given that mapping wetlands is a complex task, 2022 Atlas likely presents the lower bound of the actual wetland extent in the country and the overall number is higher than what is recorded. * It is high...
More »Man versus wild -Jaideep Hardikar
-The Telegraph In the last two decades, forest and biodiversity conservation in the country has meant ruthless and unjust evictions of the people and communities living in their midst Earlier this month, a small hamlet called Bothli in the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district pressed for the legal recognition of its community forest rights. Wildlife conservationists promptly filed a public interest litigation claiming that the people living in the...
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