India

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Stories

This Women's Collective Is Using Agroecology to Fight India's Green Revolution 10/15 See Vandana Shiva on farmer suicides.

India Promises to Slash Emissions, but Wants Help. India submitted its long-awaited climate pledge on Thursday, vowing to reduce the intensity of its emissions 33 to 35 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. "It’s an aggressive, positive, solutionary and balanced approach," said Harjeet Singh from ActionAid, an international non-governmental organization.

India Heatwave Kills 800+ and Literally Melts the Roads 5/15. See Global Warming.

The $20 prosthetic knee that could change lives in India 2/15.

Jailed & Shot for Fighting Coal: Q&A With Ramesh Agrawal, Goldman Prize Winner 5/14.

Epidemic of farmer suicides shown in great but heart-breaking Bitter Seeds documentary. Vandana Shiva.

Spurring thousands of farmer suicides.

In India, more than 250,000 farmers have taken their own lives after Monsanto’s Bt cotton seeds didn’t perform as promised. Monsanto has established a seed monopoly when it comes to Indian cotton. Seeds used to be the property of the farmer, but Monsanto patents the seeds it has genetically modified—even second-, third- and fourth-generation seeds are considered to be “Monsanto-owned.” Monsanto has created a monopoly in the country and its GMO seeds the only ones available, so farmers are forced to purchase the seeds from Monsanto, often on credit. When those seeds don’t perform as promised, or sometimes even if they do, the farmers are left trapped in severe poverty and debt. Some farmers have turned to drinking Monsanto’s poisonous pesticides in an attempt to free their families from that debt.

In a 2013 Al Jazeera article titled “Seeds of Suicide and Slavery Versus Seeds of Life and Freedom,” Vandana Shiva wrote that Monsanto’s PR is in stark contrast to reality. Of Monsanto India’s website, she wrote, “All the pictures are of smiling prosperous farmers from the state of Maharashtra. However, we see that the reality on the ground is completely different. Farmers are in debt and in deep distress, and have become dependent on Monsanto's seed monopoly.”

She wrote that what was once the cotton belt in India is now the suicide belt: “The highest suicides are in Maharashtra. Monsanto's talk of 'technology' tries to hide its real objectives of ownership, where genetic engineering is just a means to control seeds and the food system through patents and intellectual property rights.”

Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist, environmental activist and author. Shiva, currently based in New Delhi, is author of over 300 papers in leading scientific and technical journals, very involved in water and agricultural issues. Shiva participated in the nonviolent Chipko movement during the 1970s. The movement, whose main participants were women, adopted the tactic of hugging trees to prevent their felling. Video of discussion about granting rights to the earth. Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest.

UCSC Computer science major Radhika Mitra founded a tax-deductible charitable organization called Renaissance Now to help artisans in developing countries.

Can Microgrids Bring Low-Carbon Power to Tens of Millions of People? 1/14.

School under a bridge in India includes girls. (video)

Indian Eco-heroes, Amit Jethwa and P.D. Majhi, killed by poachers are part of a larger and disturbing trend/history.

India Leads World In Green Power Growth For 2011 solar. 12/12

India's living bridges

Eco WALK the Talk is a social enterprise environmental website with an Asia focus.

Popularly known as the "Clothing Man", social entrepreneur Anshu Gupta created a mass movement for recycling and reusing tons of waste material by establishing a culture of sustained donations from urban, wealthy India and its impoverished rural areas. His organization, GOONJ.., has a mechanism for second-hand clothes and goods to pass from the wealthy to the poor, tackling a very basic and often neglected human need while also reducing waste. Ashoka video intro and longer video.

TEDIndia Ever since founding the first truly effective ambulance service in India, Shaffi Mather has been hooked on social enterprises. He's gone on to set up inclusive high-quality schools, support small-scale dairy farming, and is now launching a bribe-fighting business. video.

Barefoot College in India trains poor women to build, install and maintain solar energy, empowering them and their villages. PBS News Hour. See also TEDtalk.

Francis Lappe sees the end of hunger in Indian women's group 12/12

News

India’s new prime minister is big on solar power but The U.S. denied him a visa following accusations that he fueled ethnic violence that left nearly 1,000 people dead, most of them Muslims, in his home state of Gujarat in 2002, where he has served as the equivalent of a governor since 2001 5/14. Gore in Rolling Stone: "In poorer countries, where most of the world's people live and most of the growth in energy use is occurring, photovoltaic electricity is not so much displacing carbon-based energy as leapfrogging it altogether. In his first days in office, the government of the newly elected prime minister of India, Narendra Modi (who has authored an e-book on global warming), announced a stunning plan to rely principally upon photovoltaic energy in providing electricity to 400 million Indians who currently do not have it. One of Modi's supporters, S.L. Rao, the former utility regulator of India, added that the industry he once oversaw 'has reached a stage where either we change the whole system quickly, or it will collapse.' Nor is India an outlier. Neighboring Bangladesh is installing nearly two new rooftop PV systems every minute — making it the most rapidly growing market for PVs in the world. In West and East Africa, solar-electric cells are beginning what is widely predicted to be a period of explosive growth..."

In India, Farmers Pick Heartier Seeds Over Those With High Yields

India, home to the world’s largest population of wild tigers, created a new protected area for the big cats. In March, the Indian government declared the forests of Sathyamangalam Wildlife Sanctuary a Tiger Reserve. This new reserve connects two other protected areas and secures another critical piece in one of the most important and largest contiguous tiger habitats in the world. In addition to sheltering a healthy tiger population, this forest complex is home to leopards, elephants, hyenas and vultures.

Indian farmers smash crop yield records without GMOs 2/13.

Ancient Farmers’ Dances Threatened With Extinction

10/19

By NEHA THIRANI As globalization and urbanization push cultural change across India, many ancient art forms are dying out from lack of interest and funding. Purulia Chhau, a form of masked dance performed by farmers in West Bengal to celebrate the harvest season, is one. A farmers' dance, Chhau is held during the three-month spring festival of Chaitra Parva to thank the gods for a good harvest before the next agricultural cycle. Chhau, a vigorous masked dance with acrobatic and martial elements, performed to the beat of tribal drums, is at risk of becoming extinct. In the last five years, the number of Purulia Chhau troupes has dropped from 300 to 100 in West Bengal, due to a lack of funding and performance opportunities, as well as changing lifestyles in the region. "India's tangible heritage, such as its monuments, paintings, artefacts, can be safeguarded within the four walls of museums," said Shubha Srinivasan, a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation Mumbai who is working to preserve India's declining local dance forms. "But intangible cultural heritage, such as performing arts or oral traditions, are harder to preserve or measure," she said. "They are a way of life, really." In her recent book "Masked Identities: Safeguarding India's Intangible Cultural Heritage," Ms. Srinivasan explores the Chhau dance form as well as Kutiyattam, a 2,000-year-old Sanskrit theater drama with origins in Kerala. She traveled across the country to write the book, meeting artists in West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Orissa. Besides Purulia Chhau, which comes from the Purulia district of West Bengal, other forms of the dance include Seraikella Chhau, from Jharkhand, and Mayurbhanj Chhau, from Orissa. Chhau dancers enact Indian mythological stories from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas and the Rig Veda, focusing on the lesser-known subplots in these ancient tales. The dancers, typically males ranging in age from 9 to 65, wear intricately painted masks that depict different mythological characters, taking on the identity of the character as they dance.

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Age-Old Fixes for India’s Water

10/8

By CHERYL COLOPY INDIA’S monsoon rains are retreating this week, a delayed end to a yearly wet season that has become ever more unpredictable as a result of global warming. Of all the challenges that face India, few are more pressing than how it manages water. In vast cities like New Delhi, where showers and flush toilets have become necessities for a rapidly expanding middle class, groundwater has been depleted. New Delhi once had many ponds and an open floodplain to absorb the monsoon and replenish aquifers; now the sprawling city has more concrete and asphalt than it has ponds and fields to absorb water. India’s capital has come to rely for half its water on dams in the Himalaya range that capture monsoon runoff. But the dams disrupt the ecology of the Himalaya, South Asia’s precious watershed. Much of the waste from New Delhi’s overwhelmed sewage treatment system ends up in the Yamuna River, one of the main tributaries of the Ganges, which winds down from the Himalaya and flows 1,500 miles across India to the Bay of Bengal. Combined with under-regulated industrial effluents, urban waste has turned India’s mythic and misused rivers into cesspools. In the countryside, where a vast majority of Indians still live, a combination of free electricity and inadequate regulation has led farmers to deplete untold groundwater supplies. In some places the water table is so low it no longer helps sustain roots, so even more water must be pumped up. In addition, soils have been degraded by chemical fertilizers, so they require even more water. But in some parts of India, communities are turning to “rainwater harvesting,” capturing rainwater in ponds and allowing it to percolate into the ground to feed wells and springs. Such techniques were once commonplace throughout the South Asian subcontinent, where rain falls for only a few months in the summer monsoon, and often not at all for the rest of the year. Now villagers are returning to these ancient methods to secure the future. More

See also Water