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Dear Reader,
India is the seventh-most-affected country by climate change. Climate change has uprooted entire communities, impacted livelihoods, and threatened the environment and ecology with cycles of flooding, drought, and erosion. This human displacement, relocation, and migration resulted in 5.6 million climate refugees in India between 2018 and 2023 and is expected to impact a staggering 45 million citizens by 2050.
Be that as it may, Article 14 finds that climate change and the resultant human migration, despite their enormity, are a ‘blind spot’ in the government’s policy formulation and resource allocation. The story notes that the government set a target of net-zero emissions by 2070, aimed to source at least half of India’s power from renewable sources by 2023, and introduced a 143 per cent increase in budgetary allocation for renewable energy by 2023-24. But, inexplicably, it cut the allocation for the National Adaptation Fund for Climate Change to zero in 2023-24 and 2024-25, from Rs 118 crore in 2015—an instance of what the story emphasises as being symptomatic of India’s disregard for the ill effects of climate change.
India recognises nearly 3,700 sites as monuments of national importance and 43 as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Together, they represent India's rich and precious cultural and architectural legacy. Preserving them entails upkeep and care, as unsustainable tourism and vagaries of climate erode their structures. The preservation and restoration of heritage buildings in India has depended on the traditional acumen of regional craftspersons with specialised skills and expertise in specific fields—for instance, lime masons and marble workers from Rajasthan; cast-iron and Plaster of Paris specialists from UP; expert carpenters from Gujarat and Kerala; mosaic workers from Andhra Pradesh.
Over time, the work of heritage conservation has increasingly shifted to contractors, with guild workers being replaced by cheaper, less-skilled general labour. Not only has this affected the life and work of these artisans, but it has also led to the erosion of traditional and generational knowledge systems in heritage preservation. The Migration Story looks at the state of the guild workers and what can be done to preserve and institutionalise their generational skills and knowledge.
In Thottapally, a coastal village in Kerala’s Alleppey district, rampant black sand mining has severely impacted the lives of local fishermen, who have lost their homes and livelihoods to the raging sea. The mining, on the pretext of flood prevention, has intensified ecological vulnerabilities and sparked prolonged protests from local communities. TrueCopy Think reports.
A longstanding gripe about India's judicial system is the long pendency of cases. With only 21 judges per million people, India falls far short of the 50 per million that the 1987 Law Commission Report recommended, and is even further from the 150 per million in the United States. The Supreme Court, which marks the completion of its 75 years next week, itself faces a daunting 83,000 pending cases.
The Supreme Court Observer looks at structural reasons for the backlog of cases. Among the challenges it identifies are the multiplicity of voices, which sometimes lend themselves to contradictions; the Court’s expanded jurisdiction, which leads to a significant number of PILs that clog the pipeline; and the significant number of appeals from the lower courts, which lie before it. Unless these systemic challenges are addressed on a war footing, the issue of pendency will remain a millstone around its neck.
For more such stories from the grantees this week, please read on.
Warmly,
Sunil Rajshekhar
IPSMF
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