-India Climate Dialogue The meteorological department’s analysis of annual rainfall for the past 50 years has found significant increasing or decreasing trends in districts that could put a spanner into India’s food security scenario. Since June 13, there has been a hiatus in the advance of southwest monsoon in the country due to the weakening of its circulation pattern. This dry spell is expected to soon change as the monsoon is likely...

-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...

-Down to Earth In Odisha, both these commodities are nationalised, thereby curtailing the rights of the people on them As the harvesting season for bamboo and kendu leaf approaches in Odisha, tension is building between the forest-dependent communities and the forest department. In Kalahandi district, around 100 Gram Sabhas are planning to assert their rights over bamboo and kendu leaf despite legal curtails. “In Kalahandi Jangal Manch meeting on February 28, we decided...

-The Hindu Hundreds of government schools, especially in tribal-dominated districts, have been shut down over the past year. Elizabeth Kuruvilla reports on the closures, the mushrooming of private schools, and the battles waged by tribal villages to keep state-funded local schools open It’s a little past four in the afternoon, the time when schools ring their closing bells in the Hatsesikhal cluster of Odisha’s tribal-dominated Rayagada district. Just before Sekhal Primary School...

-Down to Earth Activists say that in 3 villages of Kalahand district, the Odisha forest department is imposing on the rights of forest dwellers to dispose bamboo, guaranteed under FRA More than two weeks after the cabinet cleared an amendment in the India Forest Act, 1927 (IFA) to deregulate trade of bamboo grown on non-forest land, forest dwellers from Odisha are complaining that the state forest department is not letting them...