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Dear Reader,
India is in deep waters. The World Bank predicts that if India consumes water at the rate it is doing now, in less than a decade, the country will be left with half the quantum of water its citizens need to survive. Describing the situation as “precarious”, India Development Review's podcast series, ‘On the Contrary’, discusses the complexities, the challenges and what multiple stakeholders can do to find viable and sustainable solutions.
Last week, on March 21, we marked the International Day of Forests. On the occasion, the Forest Survey of India, under the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, brought out its biennial ‘State of Forest Report, 2021’. The Report announced that India’s ‘forest and tree cover’ had increased by a remarkable 2,261 sq km in just the last two years. However, experts and activists, as The Probe says, are unconvinced. This unprecedented spurt was achieved, they contend, by counting monocultural plantations as forests -- agro and commercial forestry masquerading as forest cover.
More than three decades ago, a plant species, the Senna Spectabilis, was introduced into Kerala’s Wayanad as part of a social forestry programme to quickly afforest parts of the district. However, the plant, seen as a blessing then, has proved to be a curse threatening indigenous species and the ecosystem of Wayanad. TrueCopy Think reports that the species has encroached on 123 Sq Km of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, even as the forest department battles to uproot the scourge.
And, India’s criminal justice system runs on the basis that capital punishment is reserved for the ‘rarest of rare’ cases, as laid down in the landmark 'Bachan Singh judgment' of the Supreme Court in 1989. However, as ThePrint points out, in the last few years, the apex court’s guidelines and precedents seem to have been turned on its head by an unrestrained resort to death penalties by the trial courts. Last year saw a record 165 death sentences with the number of prisoners on death row rising to 539, the highest in 17 years.
For more such stories from the grantees this week, please read on.
Warmly,
Sunil Rajshekhar
IPSMF
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