Society, Culture, Religion and History

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?

Organizer: National Institute Of Rural Development (NIRD)

Venue: National Institute Of Rural Development
             Rajendra Nagar, Hyderabad 500030

Description:
Keeping in line with the tradition of the NIRD in organizing Annual Melas, the Rural Technology Park (RTP), NIRD is organizing a “Rural Technology Mela” for four days from February 25 to 28, 2012. A large number of rural technologies, products developed by various technology developers will be displayed in the Mela. There will be about 200 stalls for displaying various rural technologies and rural products from all over the country. It is expected that a large number of technology developers, technology users, technology institutions, Universities, scientific and research organizations, Public Sector Undertakings, Departments, Self Help Groups (SHGs) from states, namely, Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and many other parts of the country are expected to participate in the Mela.

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.

The paper informs that a number of epidemiological studies on the benefits of water and sanitation interventions have shown that diarrhoea can be reduced by 30–50%.

Organizer: Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)

Venue: Centre for Science and Environment (CSE),
            41, Tughlakabad Institutional Area,
            New Delhi- 62

Description:
Managing information, in the internet era with explosive information availability demands special skills and calls for investments in strengthening the information infrastructure and skills of an organisation. This specially designed course will teach participants on how to manage all aspects and types of information, at an institutional level and develop a virtual resource centre using open source tools and technologies.

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.

This presentation by Arghyam includes the results of doctoral study done by G Sridevi under the guidance of Prof.