KEY TRENDS • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...
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‘Digging your own grave’: Illegal sand mining devastates Bihar’s rivers -Mohd Imran Khan
-TheThirdPole.net This year, Bihar extended a seasonal ban on mining sand from its rivers. But illegal sand mining continues every day across the eastern Indian state Deep inside the riverine belt of Koelwar in Bhojpur district of Bihar, around four to five kilometres from the main road and well out of sight, a dozen labourers are cutting and digging a portion of the Sone River in bright afternoon sunshine. Bare-chested, wielding spades...
More »3 Months Before Polls, Uttarakhand’s BJP Govt Made Mining Easier In State Ravaged By Landslides, Deforestation -Prudhviraj Rupavath
-Article-14.com Even as landslides increased 2900% over five years in a fragile Himalayan state ravaged by deforestation and construction, the government of chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami lifted environmental safeguards and made mining easier, two months before state elections. The High Court has demanded the government explain the changes, rushed through in 15 days in a state where mining companies are major funders of political parties. New Delhi: Two months before elections...
More »Attacks on RTI Activists Are Rising. We Need Accountability Laws. -Aruna Roy, Mayank Labh and Meera M Panicker
-TheWire.in The recent attack on an RTI activist in Rajasthan's Barmer must be seen within a larger culture of violence in the country, being perpetrated to settle scores while the state says nothing. The Right to Information (RTI) application has long since drawn violence for its use as a tool to disrupt the corrupt status quo in the country and another such incident has recently taken place in Rajasthan. Amra Ram Godara, a...
More »Kerala floods and the CAG alarm bell that went unheeded -AM Jigeesh
-The Hindu Business Line The 2016 report had flagged the disastrous impact of unchecked Illegal Constructions; but it was never tabled in the Assembly Early warnings of a 2016 draft report of the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG) Kerala office about the disastrous implications of the environmental degradation due to unchecked and Illegal Construction activities in the State seem to have been buried, with the report inexplicably not getting tabled in the...
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