Adequate involvement of academicians and policy makers is most essential for effective management of forests and common resources in the country, said Jairam Ramesh, Union minister of environment and forest. Delivering the keynote address at the inaugural ceremony of the 13th biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), being held in the city on Monday, the Union minister put the spotlight on the environmental...

Economists across the world are expressing concern about rising food prices. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently released its Food Price Index. The list showed that a number of foods cost more than during the world food crisis of two thousand eight. The index is at its highest level since it began in nineteen ninety. Demonstrations and deadly food riots have broken out this month, as they did in...

Villagers of Netai in Lalgarh could not conceal their grievance against the state administration when district police superintendent Monoj Verma and district magistrate Surendra Gupta reached the village on Sunday morning to supervise arrangements before governor M K Narayanan's visit on Wednesday. Gupta and Verma arrived at the village, escorted by heavy security, around 11am. Gupta started visiting different portions of the village and found a tube well that was not...

If forests belong to the forest-dwellers, then the coastal areas should belong to the fishing community. Acting on this line, the government is proposing to bring in a new law — modelled on the Forests Rights Act — to establish rights of fishermen on the coastal areas and resources found therein. The Forests Rights Act, passed by Parliament in 2006 and brought into force in 2008, recognises the rights of tribals...

A Supreme Court judgment projects the historical thesis that India is largely a country of old immigrants and that pre-Dravidian aborigines, ancestors of the present Adivasis, rather than Dravidians, were the original inhabitants of India. If North America is predominantly made up of new immigrants, India is largely a country of old immigrants, which explains its tremendous diversity. It follows that tolerance and equal respect for all communities and sects are...