CEDNEWS January 2007

cednews - january 2007

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What's in store for us this year?

The Forest Rights Bill has been passed by the Indian Parliament. In this connection the Campaign for Survival and Dignity Network and the Campaign of Forest Peoples will meet to critically look at the provisions, many of which negate the spirit of the Bill, and spite the forward looking provisions and basic structure of the proposals. It's a story of a few steps forward, and a couple of steps backward.

Note - The National Convention on the Forest Rights Act is being held at Gandhi Bhavan, Bhopal on the 29th January, 2006

Another noteworthy happening - some time this year (or may be the next), more than half of us will be living in urban habitats. If this is seen as a sign of inevitable progress, we need to think again. What happens in the long run? Yes, it will signify great progress. But in the near future the sobering thought is that more than half, and probably up to two-thirds of the newly urbanized will be poor people, looking for the crumbs as far as jobs and housing is concerned.

More than that, nearly half of the humanity that will remain in the rural areas will be poor people, again, mostly in the non-industrialized countries. They will see increasing pressure on their already scarce resources. Is this doomsday pessimism? Not really. It is just to bring home to us that the rural areas, in spite of development - rather, because of so called development and our elitist focus, both rural and urban, has seen unprecedented immiseration of natural resource based communities, dry land farmers, fishing communities, forest - dwellers, traditional artisans and agricultural laborers.

The mistaken point is not that they should be protected to remain where they are, but the development choices we make do not consider their needs - and only serve to corrupt their aspirations.

This is the perspective with which we need to see the approaching urbanization of humanity.

And do something about it.

Read on ... some of the stories on these issues that we have picked out for you this month ...

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The Forest Rights Bill is an important step in the struggle to reverse the historical marginalization of tribal people.
The passage of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill, 2006, on December 18 is an important step in the struggle to reverse the historical marginalization of the tribal people of India. Survival at Stake, Archana Prasad, Frontline, December 30, 2006

More than half of the world's people will soon live in cities. Are aid agencies and governments ready for the social and environmental implications?
Sometime this year or next, humanity will officially cross the line from being a rural to an urban species. For the first time in history, more of us will live in cities and urban areas than in the countryside, and the social and environmental implications of this transition to a predominantly urbanized world are enormous. When people live mostly in the cities, David Satterthwaite, The Hindu, January 18, 2007

A study by the world's leading experts, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change, says global warming will happen faster and be more devastating than previously thought.A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due to be published next week, shows the frequency of devastating storms will increase dramatically. Sea levels will increase; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans will become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heat waves will become more prevalent. Global warming: the final verdict, Robin McKie, The Observer, January 21, 2007

Demand Full Investigation and Remediation On December 24, 2006, one of the pipes carrying radioactive wastes from the Uranium mill to a storage dam had burst, discharging highly toxic wastes into a nearby creek. When released into the environment in such a hazardous manner, the radioactive wastes are deadly to the people living in the surrounding area as well as their land and water. Accident at Jadugoda: Burst pipe, received by email, www.jadugoda.net

Here is a classic case of manufactured consent. News is agog that India will have its Harvard University in next two years. Even Forbes Magazine testifies to that. The corporate media hails a proposed university in India to be the greatest hope of reified vision where huge mass of people will be educated for betterment of India's economy; and, its poor state (Orissa). Orissa: Throttled Dissent, Overstepped Laws, Displaced People by Saswat Pattanayak, radicalnotes.com, January 14, 2007

The Singur events are signs of a crisis borne out of a disjuncture between the Left Front's pragmatic policies and the legacy of the movement and class interests that empowered it. For a long time, the open eruption of this crisis was evaded by the West Bengal government's success in convincing its mass base of its ability to manoeuvre state apparatuses for small, yet continuous gains. Singur and the Official Left's Crisis in India by Pratyush Chandra, radicalnotes.com, December 29, 2007

We live in different times today, with a historically new political culture in the making, with a far greater popular and widespread emphasis on democracy, equality, and horizontality in human relations. The proposals of the Bamako Appeal, and also of all the other documents proposing such a programme, have therefore been and continue to be hotly debated within the WSF. The Bamako Appeal in particular, otherwise very distinguished, has been subjected to intense criticism and debate in many parts of the world and online, both in terms of its content but also of the process by which it was drawn up and has been taken forward. One of the main issues is the manner in which it appears to be proposing a political programme for the World Social Forum and for the still-emerging global social justice movements but without saying as much. A Political Programme for the World Social Forum ? Democracy, Substance and Debate in the Bamako Appeal and the Global Justice Movements - a Reader, Jai Sen, Madhuresh Kumar, Patrick Bond and Peter Waterman, January 2007, CACIM, New Delhi & CCS, Durban

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The Hit & the Affected - Social Rights of Tsunami Victims
Henri Tiphagne, People's Watch-Tamil Nadu, has closely observed the tsunami reconstruction process.
In the interview, he tells what went wrong and why. Henri believes that the Government's interference in making of temporary shelters is the cause for their dismal condition. He blames the Government and the NGOs for neglecting the Dalit victims. Other issues raised in the interview are the quality of boats and excessive numbers, given by NGOs, the MoUs and corruption in tsunami rehabilitation process and the absence of grievance redressal mechanism post-disaster.

Water Infrastructure in Urban India: Commodify or Communitize?
From mineral water to packaged drinking water, water has come a long way from being freely available to a commodity with a brand name. However several attempts are being made to change this trend and to communitize water, which has been commodified under several brand names. BCIL has taken one such initiative to communitize water.
This is a lecture cum presentation by Chandrashekar Hariharan, Bio-diversity Conservation India Limited (BCIL), recorded in April 2006, at Paris.

CDs available at CED

|Latest from CED|

Development Digest (DD15) - includes:
An Open Letter to M S (Swaminathan) from a farmer - Bhaskar Save;
Amartya Sen on globalism, on Democracy;
Vernacular Values by Ivan Illich;
and more

Rebuilding our Lives - A Backgrounder on the Right to Work & NREGA in the context of post-tsunami reconstruction (in English and Tamil)

Copies available at CED

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