India
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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
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
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. |
| 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
