Counterview

Mahatma Mandir under construction By A Representative A Right to Information (RTI) application, filed by senior activist Kirit Rathod, has revealed that the Gujarat government has refused to form a State-level Environmental Appraisal Committee (SEAC), which is supposed to provide environmental clearance to Category B projects not requiring Government of India nod, for the last six months. The result is, if the reply to the application is any guide, exactly 1,739 projects, most of them of the small entrepreneurs, have remained without being cleared since July 2013, when the former SEAC’s three-year term expired. The SEAC mainly consists of ex-bureaucrats and experts, who look into environmental issues, and examine whether a particular project would require to undergo public hearing or not.

A Dalit household during Bihar floods of 2007 Counterview Desk In a fresh move that will have a major impact on the way international donors support NGOs in countries like India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the European Union (EU) has suggested that funding agencies should be sensitive to caste-based discrimination issues while disbursing humanitarian aid. A new EU-sponsored report, “Equality in Aid: Addressing Caste Discrimination in Humanitarian Response”, authored by Katherine Nightingale, has advised “international donors” that they should “ensure accountability” of NGOs in addressing “caste-based discrimination in all the programmes they fund, with a particular emphasis on supporting measures to address caste-based discrimination.”

By A Representative A Gujarat government website has said that the state has witnessed “considerable degradation of the mangroves”, and big dams in the upstream are one of the major reasons behind this. The website, http://www.geciczmp.com/ , owned by the state forest department’s Integrated Coastal Zone Management Project, being implemented by the Gujarat Ecology Commission (GEC), has explained that “reduction in natural regeneration and death of the rich mangroves” has taken place “because of decreased influx of fresh water into the mangrove areas due to construction of dams, both small and big, in upstream areas.”

By A Representative Protest against the construction of the Garudeshwar weir across Narmada river, about 12 kilometres downstream of the Narmada dam, took a new turn on the Republic Day when senior activists of the environmental group Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, Vadodara, and women’s NGO Sahiyar succeeded in convincing the affected villagers about the need to intervene and stop the work which has begun. The result was, following a village-to-village campaign on January 26, on January 27 a team of women from several villages reached Narmada river along the Garudeshwar village and succeeded in ensuring a stop on the ongoing work.

Modi in Kerala in Sept 2013 By A Representative A senior Kerala researcher, Meera Velayudhan, currently working as fellow, Council for Social Development (CSD), Hyderabad, has argued that the recent invitation forwarded to Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi to address a mass rally in Alwaye in February 2014 to commemorate 100 years of the founding of the Pulaya Mahjana Sabha, Kochi, is “shocking” and “a travesty of history”, because in 1993, the Kerala Pulayar Mahajana Sabha, which was founded in the early part of the 20th century in its fight against casteism, had protested the demotion of the Babri Masjid as “an attack on India’s secular fabric” and called for “protection of religious rights and harmony”.

A previous protest against weir By A Representative The Sitter Gaam Adivasi Sanghathan (SGAS), an organization of 70 villages formed to oppose the proposed Garudeshwar weir being constructed 12 km downstream of the Narmada dam for promoting tourism, has decided to hold a protest rally on the Republic Day at Indravarna, one of the villages to be affected, saying, the rally will start immediately after flag-hoisting ceremony. In a statement, SGAS has said, the weir is being constructed in violation of the state environmental laws, and construction of the weir be immediately stopped.

By A Representative A senior human rights campaigner has alleged that Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi is misusing Gujarat government’s NRI funds to “export” ministers, police officers, IAS bureaucrats and senior government functionaries to other Indian states in order to “propagate” Gujarat’s progress. Well-known anti-Modi crusader Shabman Hashmi, in association with several Gujarat-based activists Mahesh Pandya, Hemant Shah, Manan Trivedi and Gautam Thakker, said this while releasing documents which state that the government's NRI funds, meant to establish cultural ties with non-resident Gujaratis living abroad, are being illegitimately used for Modi poll propaganda.