-Down to Earth In 41% of the cases, communities allege that authorities or project proponents did not follow proper procedures for the takeover of land Disputes concerning commons land accounted for 75.94 per cent of all the existing and resolved land-related conflicts, according to a new report. The report titled Land Locked: Investments and Lives in Land Conflicts, released by Land Conflict Watch (LCW), a Delhi-based research agency, arrived at this conclusion after...

-The Telegraph Radhakamal Mukerjee: an ecological pioneer In 1922, a professor at Lucknow University named Radhakamal Mukerjee published a book called Principles of Comparative Economics. Reading the book one hundred years later, I was struck by the attention it paid to the impact of the natural environment on the social and economic life of Indian villages. Mukerjee was perhaps the first Indian scholar to recognise the vital importance of common property resources...

-Newsclick.in The Van Gujjars are among a few surviving transhumant pastoral communities worldwide. They are a rarity in that they are one of the few Muslim Tribals who have survived as nomads to the present day. Eighty-six Families from Silan, a Van Gujjar settlement in Shivpuri Range, Tehri Garhwal, have filed their claims under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 and further submitted them...

-India.Mongabay.com * The allocation of lands for new commercial coal mines is likely to renew issues related to the creation of land banks in Jharkhand. * Common lands that people use have been transferred to land banks over the years, and physical surveys to record actual rights aren’t complete yet. * Lack of effective implementation of the Forest Rights Act 2006 on forest land (also part of land banks) has been a major...

-The Telegraph In the last two decades, forest and biodiversity conservation in the country has meant ruthless and unjust evictions of the people and communities living in their midst Earlier this month, a small hamlet called Bothli in the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district pressed for the legal recognition of its Community Forest Rights. Wildlife conservationists promptly filed a public interest litigation claiming that the people living in the...