-Hindustan Times Lip service: Amarinder Singh sought votes on the promise of a waiver, but now faces heat as more than half the state’s farmers have been left out of the scheme. Bathinda: The weather-beaten face of Rajpal Singh shows signs of anxiety as he stands in one corner of his eight-acre farmland in Punjab’s Bathinda, surveying the standing wheat crop that is almost ready for harvest. Singh might get a reasonable price...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Anti-forest, anti-forest dweller -Chitrangada Choudhury
-The Hindu The Compensatory Afforestation Fund is a deeply flawed and unjust mechanism Last month, Minister of State for Environment, Forests and Climate Change Mahesh Sharma informed Parliament that his Ministry has collected over ?50,000 crore in a Central compensatory afforestation fund (CAF). This money is to be used though the Compensatory Afforestation Fund (CAF) Act, 2016 or CAF, a purported mechanism to offset forest loss. Before issuing forest clearances to a...
More »National Forest Policy Draft 2018 Takes One Step Forward, Two Steps Back -Sushant Agarwal
-TheWire.in Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize. On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the...
More »NREGA turns its focus on farm ponds -Aswin J Kumar
-The Times of India Thiruvananthapuram: The efforts of district NREGA cell to recreate assets to deal with possible drought situation have produced good results in some of the rural panchayats in the district. Construction of farm ponds which was extensively carried out under employment guarantee scheme has gifted the district with over 2,000 farm ponds in areas where agriculture is the predominant occupation. The move also triggered a shift from the usual...
More »Centre seeks to change forest policy to promote industrial plantations in natural forests -Kumar Sambhav Shrivastava
-Scroll.in The existing policy bans commercial activity in natural forests to protect forest dwellers. The new draft policy is up for public comments till April 14. The Union government has drafted a new National Forest Policy. If approved, the policy will allow the corporate sector to grow, harvest and sell trees on government-owned forest lands. So far, this is explicitly banned under the existing National Forest Policy, which was laid down...
More »