-Down to Earth None of the 30 low and middle-income countries analysed met the standards of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women In what could be a wake-up call to global conservation efforts, a new report by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) says that legal protections for indigenous and rural women to own and manage property are missing in India and 29 other...

-TheWire.in Instead of evicting forest-dwelling communities for engaging in traditional activities in protected areas and reserved forests, the government should use them for co-management. In a circular released on March 28, 2017, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) ordered the directors of all tiger reserves to refrain from recognising the rights of forest dwellers within critical tiger habitats. Since its enactment in 2006, the scheduled tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of...

When it comes to child under-nutrition, the proportion of stunted and underweight children below 5 years has reduced in India during the last ten years. However, a rising trend has been observed in the prevalence of wasting among children below 5 years between the last two rounds of National Family Health Survey (NFHS). The recently released data from NFHS-4 indicates that the proportion of under 5 year children who are...

-The Hindu For the Chenchus, the Nallamala forest is their home. Not any longer after a National Tiger Conservation Authority order stripped them of their rights in a bid to fortify India’s largest tiger reserve. The sun has barely risen but the Chenchu men and women along with their children are out on a long trek, one which will take them deep into the Nallamala forest along the Eastern Ghats, in...

-Frontline.in The British government, on the basis of an 1891 report on the subhuman living conditions of “Pariahs” by James H.A. Tremenheere, Acting Collector of Chengleput, assigned 12 lakh acres of land for distribution to the “depressed classes” of the Madras Presidency to empower them socially and economically. But more than 100 years later, much of this land is in the possession of non-Dalits, and the struggle to reclaim them has...