August 2007 Edition
Civil Society News
New Delhi
CHANDNIMAL is a village some distance from Sambhalpur town in Orissa. It is locally famous for a school set up by the residents, mostly scheduled castes and tribes, so that their children can get an education. The school works so well that it also attracts children from neighbouring villages and they board with Chandnimal families. When one of the trustees of the Smile Foundation turned up at the village,eager to learn more about the school, he found the headmaster gambolling in the local pond with the students. He was impressed by the bonding that was in evidence. The Hiradari Yuvak Sangh, a club of the villagers, had imbued the school with an enthusiasm for education that is hard to come by. The Sangh had also succeeded in getting government recognition for the school so that the children could take their Class X exam.
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Rina Mukherji
Kolkata
WEST Bengal and Bangladesh are experiencing the effects of global warming as islands in the Sundarbans get swallowed by the sea. Lohachhara and Bedford have already disappeared, while a dozen more like Mousuni, Sagar, Dalhousie, Ghoramara, and G -plot are facing severe erosion. Sagar, in particular, has lost 30 square km over the past 30 years. Fifty-two out of 100 islands support a population of 1.8 million people. In Bangladesh, several acres in Chokoria Sundarbans are under water.
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Ramesh Venkataraman
THE National Aids Control Programme -3 (NACP3) document which
hundreds of us worked very hard to contribute to, was finally
launched. So were the new HIV estimates for India which said
numbers of those affected were less by 50 per cent. Everyone, except
those who will eventually take the plan to the last mile, were present
on the occasion. And they agreed in quiet compliance. There wasn’t
even token representation from the positive people’s networks. Civil society representation of any significance was entirely missing. This
was certainly not by design, I’m sure, but it is an oversight that no one
will apologise for.
Read More...
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Vidya Viswanathan
New Delhi
IT was a cold and grey winter’s day in Delhi in December 2002. But if the weather outside was lousy, it was nowhere near being as bleak as Janak Rawal felt within as he squirmed in his chair before a senior officer of the National Medicinal Plants Board.The officer cursorily flipped through Rawal’s newly released Medherb Green Pages and then, with a dismissive arrogance that comes easily when in government, dropped the publication in the wastepaper basket near his table.
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Vidya Viswanathan
Pangot (Uttarakhand)
THERE are many destinations to escape to from Delhi, but few as cool, homely and full of beautiful surprises as Pangot, a village in Uttarakhand’s Kumaon region which attracts bird-watchers from all over the world. Pangot is 15 km from Nainital. After passing thistouristy hill station we went on a spectacular 25-minute drive through oak and rhododendron forests in the Cheena Peak range efore arriving at Pangot. On our right there was a turquoise blue and maroon building which housed a post-office. The road now reached a dead end. A wooden signboard with Jungle Lore stencilled on it pointed to a pebbly path leading to a cottage.
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Riaz Quadir
Versailles
IF a fictional story began like this: once upon a time an American President appointed a British Prime Minister, who had helped him start the Iraq War against the Baathist regime to help adjust the unjust tyranny of the Sunni minority against the Shia majority, as the Envoy Special of the Great Western Powers to resolve the long standing issues between the Muslims and the Jews, the Arabs and the Israelis, tearing up the Middle East… the story would sound as bizarre as this Proustian sentence, but in reality it sounds perfectly normal – even predictable – given the nature of the realpolitik that rules the world. As the cliché goes, truth is indeed stranger than any serving of the imagination
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