Farmers in Bagli village of Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh will organise a public hearing on Oct 8 on the harmful impact of chemical fertilizers on soil. Several agriculture experts, government officials, politicians and representatives of civil society are expected to attend the hearing. The public hearing is part of the 'Living Soils' campaign launched by Greenpeace India to highlight soil health and its relevance to food security. 'The hearing will review the...

In the last few years in different parts of India the issue of land acquisition has become politically explosive.  This isn’t surprising as land, one of the few assets possessed by large numbers of people, particularly in rural India, is rising disproportionately in potential value as commercial and industrial development picks up, as there is never a dearth of real estate magnates, land speculators, local mafia, their political patrons and...

Activists and many residents blame a hydel project for the growing frequency of landslides in some Uttarakhand villages. THE nearly 3,500 residents of Bhatwadi village along the Uttarkashi-Gangotri highway in Uttarakhand saw their world come crashing down around them on the night of August 12/13. A massive landslide that hit the village formed cracks up to five metres wide on the highway and these crept up the hills to over 100...

Two days after the government scrapped a bauxite mining project in Orissa, Rahul Gandhi visited Niyamgiri, the ground zero of the anti-mine protests and told tribals that he was their sipahi in Delhi. Around the same time, farmers in Uttar Pradesh said they wouldn’t sell their land at the rates the government was offering. India is growing fast, but hassles over the acquisition of land are going to be the...

It is about capitalism and hierarchy The government has now reached a final conclusion on the raging controversy over the caste-based census in the country. In order to reconcile with the contending positions, the government has decided to conduct a separate stand-alone exercise of a parallel house-to-house enumeration of the caste affiliations of households. It is not yet clear as to whether the results and the data of the census proper...