South Asia Citizens Web

Leo Saldanha, ESG India Mon, May 11, 2015
To: PRAKASH JAVADEKAR Cc: seshadri satyanarayanan Mr. Prakash Javadekar, Minister of State (IC) for Environment, Forest & Climate Change Govt. of India
Respected Mr. Javadekar,
Thank you for taking interest in my comment on the proposed redefinition of "forest", which I had shared publicly in light of an editorial in Deccan Herald entitled "Redefining Forests, recipe for disaster". I note that in your cryptic response, you have accused (…)

Yesterday May 7 the Women’s Court on war crimes against women during the war in the 1990ies formally started in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
Women have come together from all the corners of the former-Yugoslavia to participate in the Women’s Court in Sarajevo, to demand justice for the crimes committed against them during the wars and the enduring inequalities and suffering that followed.

We write to you today as members and representatives of Indian civil society organizations and, most importantly as Indian citizens, to express our deep concern at how civil society organizations in general and their support systems, including donors, are being labeled and targeted.

The Pachwara Central Coal Block now de-allocated from PANEM, but re-allocated to the Punjab State Electricity Board (now PSPCL) formed a Joint venture with EMTA to mine the Block. The Coal Block has now been re-alloted to PSPCL. Contextualizing the present condition of the villagers with the findings of the Independent People’s Tribunal constituted in Ranchi in November 2014, the report raises crucial questions on the nature and circumstances of negotiations where the community was coerced into signing an MoU that lacked legal validity with the company it had stiffly opposed.

The disaster is a grim reminder of how vulnerable large parts of South Asia are to natural calamities like earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, flash floods and landslides. It also shows how unprepared the region’s societies are to cope with these, and how governments routinely fail to mitigate their effects on the plea that some of these events cannot be predicted.