Equity

Organization: Rashtriya Jan Sansad / National People's Parliament

Description:
India, our country, is today at the crossroads. Despite our intense and diverse human, natural, cultural and technological resources the Constitutional endowments of freedom, equity and justice appear to be a distant dream. On the one side a small group of people have never had it so good with top class infrastructure, privately run airports, relatively cheap air travel, fast moving cars, obscenely high salaries and the promise of a 9 % growth. On the other side the conditions of the majority continue to deteriorate: farmers' suicides; large scale displacements; the use of police and para-military forces to appropriate Adivasi lands, forests and resources and and resistance to this faced with brutality and murder; dis-employment of the urban poor due to infrastructure projects; mega corruption scandals in every development project. But of course this is of no interest to the media! Corruption in its current form seems to be so institutionalised in character and monstrous in proportion as to make past scandals look like petty deeds. Are these stories of some other land or of our own?

Close to 30 hydroelectric projects are being planned on the Teesta and its tributaries. Not only is this river an essential part of Lepcha identity and life, but it also flows through a fragile zone. In this article first published in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), Kanchi Kohli examines the ramifications of this policy.

This has been a generic first attempt that can be fine-tuned and customised for each type of ecosystem and each kind of service value. Ecosystem services are defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment as ‘the benefits people obtain from ecosystems'.

Mountains occupy 24% of the global land surface area and are home to 12% of the world’s population. Mountains have an ecological, aesthetic, and socioeconomic significance, not only for those living in the mountain areas, but also for people living beyond them. However, the importance of ecosystem services arising from mountains is not properly recognised. The HKH region is endowed with a rich variety of gene pools and species, and ecosystems of global importance. It is a storehouse of biological diversity and a priority region in many global conservation agendas. The region has many unique ecosystems that play a critical role in protecting the environment and in providing livelihoods for much of Asia and beyond.

It also deals with the threat to the biodiversity in the area due to climate changes and argues for the need to devise adaptation strategies at an urgent level to preserve the unique genetic variability of the region and the indigenous knowledge of farming practices in the area.

Shri Popatrao Pawar is an inspiring promoter of the 'Ideal Villages Movement' on "Integrated Agriculture and Rural Development for Tomorrow's Maharashtra" on the occasion of the inauguration of Observer Research Foundation's Maharashtra@50 Study Centre on 24th June 2010.

This manual is based on the work that PRIA was involved in that included facilitating the process of social development and monitoring, and for guiding the process of developing models for community monitoring linked to community action, for child survival and development in six project sites in India.

This manual is divided into three key sections:

Content courtesy: DevNetJobsIndia

Urvi Ashok Piramal Foundation (UAPF) is a not for profit organization registered under public trust act, working on mother & child health care, livelihood and environment in India since 2008. The foundation is endeavoring to reach the deprived section of the society through its various activities with the basic objective of empowering them to sustain the development process. Foundation is reaching to 1,00,000 people in various villages of India through various Education, Health Care and Livelihood initiatives. Through livelihood initiatives, UAPF is planning to provide employable skills to the youths through VSTIs/ITIs, empowerment of women through micro-entrepreneurial groups and supporting small business initiative through individual support programs and in return aiming at making tangible changes in the society.

The book covers entire eras from the ancient to the current period. It also gives information about the structural, financial and institutional aspects of tank construction and management.

The full book is available for download on the India Water Portal. Please right-click on the cover page image of the book, and select 'Save link as', to download the full book.

Design Impact (DI) is a non-profit organization that partners professional designers with community organizations. These designers work on-site with innovative organizations and the communities they serve to design and implement life-improving solutions.