A Supreme Court judgment projects the historical thesis that India is largely a country of old immigrants and that pre-Dravidian aborigines, ancestors of the present Adivasis, rather than Dravidians, were the original inhabitants of India. If North America is predominantly made up of new immigrants, India is largely a country of old immigrants, which explains its tremendous diversity. It follows that tolerance and equal respect for all communities and sects are...

An 11-member technical team from the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) visited the Lavasa hill station project, 65 km from the city, on Wednesday for a detailed assessment of the Rs 3,000-crore project in Pune district. The team will be in Pune for three days to ready the report on the project. The construction of the project was held up for want of environmental clearance. The team is conducting the...

Unfazed by the criticism from some of his ministerial colleagues for delaying the green nod for projects in ecologically sensitive areas, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh on Wednesday said the "single biggest threat" to the forests in the country is the "developmental threat". "They (forests) not only face the existential threat from encroachments...but they also face what is increasingly becoming perhaps the single biggest threat to Indian forests, which I call...

Indian civil society was dismayed and horror-struck when human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen, who has spent over three decades caring for the poor in tribal areas of central India, was sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘sedition’ along with two others, Piyush Guha and Narayan Sanyal by a Raipur Sessions Court judge.  Protests are taking place everywhere in the country and the members of India’s vibrant civil society, peoples’ movements,...

The implementation of the Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act in Madhya Pradesh faces a host of problems due to a strange interpretation of the Act by the Forest Department. While the department's opposition to the Act is no secret — several petitions have been filed against it in the Supreme Court by retired forest officials or organisations run by them — new information obtained...