-Down to Earth Inspector General of Forests AK Mohanty sent letter to all states, alleging discrepancies About 70 per cent data on compensatory afforestation was “incorrect or incomplete”, according to a letter Inspector General of Forest, AK Mohanty. The letter, dated August 10, 2020, was sent to principal secretaries for forests of all states and Union territories. The data in question was for work done under the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act, 2016 and...

-TheWire.in As one village prepares to take the government to court, another claims panchayat land reserved for scheduled castes was auctioned by proxy to ‘upper caste’ families. Chandigarh: One-and-a-half months ago, Amrik Kaur, sarpanch of village Sekhowal in Ludhiana district, was asked to attend a meeting at the Ludhiana deputy commissioner’s office. There, she was asked to give her consent for the transfer of a portion of the village common (shamlat) land...

-Down to Earth The region, with eight per cent of India’s total geographical area, has 25 per cent of India’s forest cover India’s northeastern region — comprising Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura — is a unique biodiversity hotspot. The region, however, faces many environmental problems. Successive Indian forest surveys in 2015, 2017 and 2019 reported net deforestation of 628, 630 and 765 square kilometres in the region respectively. This...

-Down to Earth Their ancestors were brought in as workers nearly a century ago by the former princely state Descendants of Munda and Santhal tribals, brought to Dhenkanal district in Odisha from Jharkhand nearly a century ago by the then princely state to work in its forests, have finally been given land rights under the Forest Rights Act, 2006. The Odisha government issued a notification on July 10, 2020, for the conversion of...

Although social activists and concerned economists demanded at least Rs. 1 lakh crore to be earmarked in favour of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Finance Minister in her budget speech on 1st February allocated only Rs.61,500 crore to it for the financial year 2020-21. As compared to the fund spent on MGNREGA in 2019-20 (i.e. revised estimate of Rs.71,001.81 crore), the amount set aside for the...