Category: News

How Dalit Women Farmers Across Marathwada Are Fighting Exploitation and Claiming Land Rights!

While the battles fought by the farmers of Marathwada are well documented, not many know about the relentless fight that marks the rise of Dalit women farmers in the drought-affected region.

To establish a context, the fight for land rights of Dalit farmers began under the leadership of the late Eknath Awad, one of India’s most respected Dalit leaders, across eight districts of Maharashtra including Jalna, Aurangabad, Latur, and Beed. Kantabai Ichake, a septuagenarian from Marathwada, has now emerged as one of the leading voices at the forefront of the land rights movement. Read more

Courtesy: The Better India

How Dalit Women Farmers Across Marathwada Are Fighting Exploitation and Claiming Land Rights!

To establish a context, the fight for land rights of Dalit farmers began under the leadership of the late Eknath Awad, one of India’s most respected Dalit leaders, across eight districts of Maharashtra including Jalna, Aurangabad, Latur, and Beed. Kantabai Ichake, a septuagenarian from Marathwada, has now emerged as one of the leading voices at the forefront of the land rights movement.

Kantabai recalls how Dalit women across Marathwada were mocked by most villagers when they got together and asked for the barren common grazing land in the village because they want to cultivate it. “You will bang your heads on the rocky land and die they said,”

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Courtesy: The Better India

Campaign for fair national mineral policy

Initiative to make sure principle of intergenerational equity is made a priority

An alliance of institutions, NGOs and communities have jointly launched The Future We Need Campaign, a initiative to make intergenerational equity an essential part of the country’s new National Mineral Policy. Read more

Courtesy: The Hindu

How India is failing its infants long before they arrive at hospitals

Soon after the death of 70 infants in a tertiary care hospital in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh (UP), made the headlines last month, similar stories began to pour in from across the country. Ninety children were reported to have died in two months in Rajasthan’s Banswara district hospital; in the month of August alone, 55 children had died in Maharashtra’s Nashik Civil Hospital and 49 in UP’s Farrukhabad District Hospital.

Tragic as these deaths were, they were hardly unusual, IndiaSpend found on visiting half a dozen primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare centres in Jharkhand, another state that reported numerous infant deaths. Doctors told IndiaSpend that such seemingly high child death figures were routine for the months of July and August, when infections peak and already overburdened hospitals are unable to cope.

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Courtesy: The Hindu

Gothi Koyas recall the 30-minute horror that ‘wrecked their homes, livelihood’

HYDERABAD: The events that unfolded over half-an-hour wrecked not just their homes, but their livelihoods. Members of 36 Gothi Koya tribal families in Tadwai mandal of Jayashankar Bhupalapally district allege that they were attacked by at least 200 forest officials on Saturday, who destroyed their homes, stripped them, tied them to the trees in the forest and thrashed them black and blue. They were told that they were not supposed to be living on the Jalagalancha forest land. The families migrated from Chhattisgarh 19 years ago and made these lands their home and survive by cultivating food grains.

“We migrated years ago and we have all the mandated identity cards including Aadhar, ration cards and some of us even have voter ID cards. With no prior intimation, hundreds of officials came in tractors and brought down our homes. When the women in the village tried to stop them, they were tied up and beaten with sticks,” recalled 30-year-old Krusham Rashmi, while showing her scarred hands and feet.

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Courtesy: The New Indian Express

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