-VillageSquare.in The residents of Rampura, a small village in the buffer zone of the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, have been asked to move. But, they say, with no allocation of alternative land, where will they go? “If they come to destroy our houses with elephants, we’ll throw all our belongings and our children into the pond, form a circle and ask them to shoot us, but we will not leave...

-Business Standard Forest bureaucracy to get more policing powers, including higher immunity to use firearms and override Forest Rights Act New Delhi: The Union government has proposed an overhaul of the Indian Forest Act, 1927 which the British rulers imposed to take over Indian Forests, use them to produce timber, while curtailing and extinguishing rights of millions. But, in the draft law to replace the colonial-era act, the Union government has proposed...

-The Hindu MACHILIPATNAM (Andhra Oradesh): A group of 10 unsung volunteers has helped almost 2,000 fellow Yanadi tribal people to enrol as voters, enabling them to exercise their right to franchise in the general elections 2019. A nomadic tribe, the Yanadi in Krishna district have constantly been on the move in search of livelihood opportunities from one season to the next. With a large number of families living in the mangrove Forests...

-Hindustan Times Hasdeo Arand is one of the largest contiguous stretches of very dense Forest in central India, spanning about 170,000 hectares. The Union environment ministry has given environmental clearance for open cast coal mining in Parsa in Chhattisgarh’s dense Hasdeo Arand Forests, in a decision that could have far-reaching consequences for Forest cover conservation in India. Hasdeo Arand is one of the largest contiguous stretches of very dense Forest in central India,...

-The Hindu Sabotaging the Forest Rights Act damages democracy Since 1980, through the Forest Conservation Act (FCA), the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF) has “diverted for non-Forest use” (bureaucratese for destroyed) over 1.5 million hectares of Forest. How many Adivasis and Forest-dwellers have been evicted by this ‘lawful’ Forest destruction? Stripping these Forests has yielded thousands of crores of rupees for corporations to which a bulk of these Forestlands...