Dear Reader,

Celebrated for its serenity and being the ‘abode of the gods’, Uttarakhand now finds itself at the centre of a debate about governance, law enforcement, and growing social polarisation. A detailed ground report by The Red Mike highlights a series of local confrontations — from alleged assaults on traders in Dehradun to business disputes and public protests in Kotdwar — that have raised questions about administrative response and public order.

The report scrutinises whether authorities have acted decisively and impartially, raising concerns about lenient legal charges, delayed action, and restrictions on media access. It also references speeches by the political leadership, suggesting that political messaging around identity and demographic change has contributed to sharper public cleavages. At its core, the story delves into institutional confidence: Are state systems responding firmly and fairly? As conflicts surface more frequently, is governance keeping pace with the responsibility to maintain civic harmony and equal protection under the law?

Work on the Ken-Betwa Link Project, the first major endeavour of its kind to link two rivers — the water-replete Ken in Madhya Pradesh to the drier Betwa in Uttar Pradesh — is progressing rapidly in both states. The much-panned project, with fears of it subverting natural hydrology and ecology, is now facing challenges on the ground — protests from the largely Adivasi residents of Daudhan village in Bijawar tehsil, Chhattarpur, who have taken to the streets to register their angst at being denied due process in compensation and resettlement.

Ground Report speaks to the residents at the site of the dam, and to the district administration, to find a now increasingly familiar story common to large infrastructure projects — a litany of public disaffection. People from 13 villages in the area where the 2.13-kilometre-long dam is to be built allege a list of missteps by the state—lands not mapped correctly, abysmal amounts in compensation, and missing beneficiaries — including women, who are legally entitled to be considered for equitable compensation. As the protests have seemingly disrupted work on the dam, the authorities have taken recourse to the strong arm, including detentions.

Pench Tiger Reserve, which straddles Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, is at the heart of a debate on sustainable conservation. In the last six years, 26 people have lost their lives to tiger attacks, even as industrial and mining pressures squeeze the big mammals' habitat. A structured conservation effort is underway to reduce the human-animal conflict, reaching out to people living in and around the forest to help them reduce reliance on the land, both to reduce their risk exposure and to secure local ecology, while also instituting sustainable, stable employment. What has emerged are new livelihood opportunities — including, for the first time, for women who are trained to work as ecotourism guides.

The Migration Story travels to Maharashtra, where the Satpuda Foundation holds regular outreach programmes to educate and train women in animal behaviour and skill them in to work in the tourism industry around the reserve, which serves around 80,000 tourists each year. With almost half of the 8,000 trainees of these programmes being women, fleets of safari jeeps now line up at the borders of the reserves, as women guide tourists to viewing points, run canteens and sell souvenirs. Villages that once depended on non-timber forest products now see them less as a collection of resources and more as an ecosystem — potentially bringing a lasting and sustainable transformation to the region.

Several decades ago, in Varanasi, the Ganga bifurcated at Sadar tehsil, creating the Dhab Island, 14 kilometres long and 1.5 kilometres wide. The densely packed stretch is home to around 52,000 people in around 12 villages, many of whom belong to Scheduled Caste communities. The area is buffeted by flooding on one side and sand mining on the other, adversely impacting land for farming. Left with few employment opportunities, for years now men from the Island have been migrating abroad, mainly to the Gulf working in construction and carpentry.

In an evocative story, Janchowk talks to the people left behind by these emigrants — their wives who are widows in all but name. With their husbands far away, unable to return for years at a stretch — with some away for a decade and a half — these women have settled into what is now a long tradition of early marriage followed by years of separation. They sell vegetables and milk at the market, negotiate and earn farm wages, and make significant household decisions about education and agriculture. When the men return from their migration, the homecoming is usually bittersweet, with the children having to adapt to a stranger as their father and their wives reluctant to cede their hard-earned authority.

For more such stories from the grantees this week, please read on.

Warmly,

Sunil Rajshekhar
IPSMF