Skip to main content

Forum to create awareness on Gadgil panel report

A series of programmes to create awareness and gather support for the implementation of the Madhav Gadgil-led Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) report will begin in the district with a public discussion at Kudremukh National Park near Aladangady in Belthangady taluk on April 1.

Suma Nagesh from Chikmagalur-based Save Democracy Forum told presspersons here on Monday that the programme would dispel myths about the report among forest-dwellers, while highlighting the “negative” aspects of the K. Kasturirangan Commission report that was commissioned to replace the Gadgil panel report.
“The Gadgil panel report sought to comprehensively conserve the Western Ghats, which is a bio-diversity hotspot. The government conveniently used the Kasturirangan report to reject the Gadgil report. We have petitioned the President to reconsider the Gadgil committee report, while also creating awareness among the tribal people and forest-dwellers about the report,” said Mr. Nagesh, referring to a letter written to Pranab Mukherjee on March 15.
He blamed vested interests, industrial lobbies, and political representatives for creating fear among farmers about displacement if the reports were implemented.
“The only fear is that mining and industries will shut down. The Gadgil panel report clearly states that forest-dwellers were needed in conservation projects and it does not advocate for their displacement,” he said.
The meet will also discuss the government’s “surreptitious attempts” at displacing tribal people from KNP, said Harish Malekudiya, a resident of Aladangady.
“The government refuses to give us basic amenities, while attempting to lure us with money to leave our homes. We don’t want to shift elsewhere, but the government is making it difficult to stay on,” he said.
Mr. Gadgil himself will address the Kudremukh forest-dwellers — some of whom are fighting against displacement — on April 1.
Apart from him, activist S.R. Hiremath and writer Na. D’Souza, who had criticised the government on their “inactivity” over conserving the ghats, are expected to participate. The group will travel around the six States through which the Western Ghats traverses, and distribute materials and books in local languages elaborating on the need to implement the WGEEP report.
An integral part of the organisation’s demand is the scrapping of the Yettinahole project, which they called a hasty decision that endangers the ghats.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

High dose of Vitamin C and B3 can kill colon cancer cells: study (downtoearth)

In a first, a team of researchers has found that high doses of Vitamin C and niacin or Vitamin B3 can kill cancer stem cells. A study published in Cell Biology International showed the opposing effects of low and high dose of vitamin C and vitamin B3 on colon cancer stem cells. Led by Bipasha Bose and Sudheer Shenoy, the team found that while low doses (5-25 micromolar) of Vitamin C and B3 proliferate colon cancer stem cells, high doses (100 to 1,000 micromolar) killed cancer stem cells. Such high doses of vitamins can only be achieved through intravenous injections in colon cancer patients. The third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, colon cancer can be prevented by an intake of dietary fibre and lifestyle changes. While the next step of the researchers is to delineate the mechanisms involved in such opposing effects, they also hope to establish a therapeutic dose of Vitamin C and B3 for colon cancer stem cell therapy. “If the therapeutic dose gets validated under in vivo...
2 comments
Click Here To Read more »

"ISRO has capabilities to build geostationary satellites for air quality monitoring” (downtoearth)

Pawan Gupta's findings on trans-boundary movement of pollution (Punjab to Delhi) from biomass burning in 2015 spurred debates. He participated in discussions with Indian regulators early September at the Better Air Quality Conference in Busan on the advantages of using satellite data for air quality monitoring. He explains to Down to Earth how air quality monitoring is done using satellite data. How is satellite data used to measure air pollution? Satellites that provide information on atmospheric pollutants are normally (not always) in the low earth orbits (400-1000 km above the Earth’s surface). A single satellite can carry one or more remote sensing instruments onboard that look down to earth and obtain information about the object in the field of view of satellite sensor. The Earth receives electromagnetic radiation from the sun, which travels through space and reaches the earth-atmosphere system. The radiation then interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface...
1 comment
Click Here To Read more »