-Hindustan Times The Union environment ministry has come out with a consultation paper on amending the Forest Conservation Act 1980 to bring significant changes to forest governance in India including facilitating private plantations for harvesting and exploration or extraction of oil and natural gas deep beneath forest Land by drilling holes from outside the forest areas. Here are the highlights of the environment ministry’s proposal: Forests on private Land Until December 1996, provisions of...

-The Hindu Centre committed to turning the north-east into oil palm hub, says Agriculture Minister Guwahati: Arunachal Pradesh has finalised the National Mission on Edible Oils-Oil Palm (NMEO-OP) and will go “full swing” in implementing it across 1.33 lakh hectares soon, Chief Minister Pema Khandu has said. Speaking at the ‘Business Summit for North Eastern States’ on the NMEO-OP in Guwahati on Tuesday, Mr. Khandu said Arunachal Pradesh is geographically the largest State...

-The Telegraph APCR reproduced an account that sheds more on the ugly backdrop to the police firing and atrocity that followed A delegation of rights defenders who visited Assam’s Darrang district, where a day labourer and a child were killed in a Land reclamation drive in a minority-dominated settlement last month, has reconstructed a grim picture of the government and private groups creating a situation that culminated in the police firing. The fact-finding...

-Hindustan Times Around 250 residents of Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Arand started a march from Surguja district to Raipur, around 330 kilometres away, on Monday demanding cancellation of all coal mining projects in their region.  Environmentalists and activists are also taking part in the march. “The representatives of all 30 villages of Hasdeo Arand ... are part of this padayatra (foot march) demanding justice from state and Central government by cancelling all coal mining projects...

-Scroll.in The community feels the recent evictions are about communal politics, not Land. Assamese Muslims agree. Manikajan Bibi is scared of losing her home. It is one windowless room built with tin sheets held together by wooden beams. In nervous anticipation, she has bundled this season’s harvest of rice into two sacks, her sarees in a fraying mud brown rexine bag. A rusty trunk holds everything else – mostly a bunch of...