Vol 2.

Issue 12, 30 June 2021

Welcome back!

The second wave of the pandemic brought unprecedented challenges

for us as an organization. The upsurge in Covid infection made us put a
indefinite pause on our bi-weekly newsletter as colleagues, family,
friends and acquaintances either fell ill or we lost them to the pandemic.
One such person was Dr. Shirdi Prasad Tekur, a beloved community
physician and also Trustee to ESG, who lost the battle to Covid on 16th
of May. Until the very last moment before his hospitalisation he
remained fully committed towards treating patients, especially those
stricken by the same disease which ultimately took his life.

The pandemic also took away people like Prof. Dinesh Mohan, who
devoted his life advocating for affordable and accessible public
transport to improve quality of life for all in our cities; Sundarlal
Bahuguna, the veteran environmentalist and philosopher best known for
his association with the Chipko Movement; HS Doreswamy, a
Gandhian, freedom fighter, social activist, teacher, journalist and a
constant figure in advancing various civil and political rights struggles in
Karnataka amongst others.

As we resume our bi-weekly newsletter, we invite you to also read the

unpublished issues of EJ Matters, which we have archived on our
website.
WEBINAR SERIES & CAMPAIGNS

1. Bengaluru’s Climate Action Plan: Making it Participatory and

Inclusive

Despite the losses faced over the last two months, we challenged
ourselves to move ahead and resumed our webinar series, Bengaluru's
Climate Action Plan: Making it Participatory and Inclusive after a
month-long pause, the final session of which took place on 28th June,
2021.
Our unprecedented webinar series
for evolving a participatory Climate
Action Plan for Bengaluru concluded
with Ms. Vanditha Sharma, IAS,
Development Commissioner of
Karnataka welcoming the draft plan
and appreciating the efforts invested by ESG and the participants in
organising the effort. She assured that the collective effort invested in
developing the climate action proposals for Bengaluru would be
seriously considered for incorporation into the State Government and
BBMP’s plan in securing the ecological, social and economic future of
the metropolis. Assessing the overall import of the webinar series,
urbanist and leading architect Mr. Prem Chandavarkar stressed the
need for systems thinking and radical transformations in perception and
practice of urban governance, for the metropolis, and the region at
large, reversing prevailing crises.

We invite comments and critical review of the draft climate

action plan, which will remain open till 15th July, 2021. You can write
to us at [email protected]. Thereafter, all received responses
will be appropriately collated and the final climate action plan will be
submitted to BBMP and the Karnataka Government for possible
integration of these ideas into the official plan of the metropolis
contributing to the Paris Climate Agreement process. Detailed reports
and video recordings of each of the 9 webinars are accessible here.

2. Count Every Death

Demands for rectifying the gross undercounting of Covid deaths are

growing, and with good reason. We need to count every death, because
every life matters. To ensure every person who has perished is
remembered, that the grieving families find solace, and to also ensure
there is accountability on the part of the State, various civil society
organisations and trade unions from across Karnataka have come
together in a campaign to Count Every Death. As a part of this process,
hundreds meet online every Sunday at 5 pm to demand accountability.
To learn more about this initiative and to volunteer, visit the campaign’s
Facebook page.

ESG FEATURES

The Principal Bench of the Karnataka High Court headed by Chief

Justice Oka is set to examine the question of whether the State
Government can abdicate the essential waste management functions of
Bengaluru’s municipal corporation BBMP to a body corporate. This will
happen in an upcoming hearing on July 5 in the solid waste
management PIL being heard by the Court. ESG has already submitted
that a move to outsource and corporatise waste management in the city
is illegal and unconstitutional.

● The extraordinary humanitarian

service of our beloved friend and
trustee, Dr. Shirdi Prasad Tekur, who
we lost to Covid-19 in May, is being
honoured in unexpected yet
heartwarming ways. Here is a remembrance of his personalised brand
of medicine, while someone who almost grew up in his constant care
grieves at his untimely loss. In a village in Odisha’s Koraput a memorial
is being dedicated to Dr. Tekur in remembrance of over 30 years of
service Dr. Tekur rendered to tribal communities there.

PUBLIC HEALTH

While the world grapples with multiple

theories and investigations on the
origins of the pandemic, Dr. Zeynep
Tufekci explores for New York Times
how the world failed to learn lessons
from earlier lab accidents and from
evolving research on the threat to humans from bat coronaviruses.
Meanwhile, the latest identified variant, Delta Plus, has been flagged as
a Variant of Concern by the Indian Health Ministry. With the country
opening up as the second wave recedes, an explainer by fluid
mechanics researchers for The Indian Express underscores the need of
making ventilation a prominent part of the national strategy to minimise
infection risks.

BIODIVERSITY, CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENT

Last month’s momentous report from the first ever IPBES-IPCC
workshop reminded us again that biodiversity protection and climate
action can, and must, go hand in hand. Aathira Perinchery highlights the
critical need for conservation and restoration of grasslands, which are
finally being recognised as more reliable carbon sinks than even forests.
While the unprecedented heatwave in
Canada and the US has advanced the
sense of urgency for climate action, a New
York Times essay highlights how
indigenous communities are at most at risk
of being thrice dispossessed--first by white settlers, then by
governments, and now by climate change. This draws parallels to the
dispossession and marginalisation of India’s adivasis, and their
increased vulnerability to the impacts of environmental degradation and
climate change.

Lawsuits are fast becoming a key strategy to hold governments

and institutions to account for the climate crisis. An interactive in the
Guardian spotlights 26 cases filed by US cities and states against oil
and gas companies for their role in fuelling climate change. In a case
brought by a coastal French town, an apex French court has threatened
the government with sanctions if it does not take steps by March 2022
to align the country with its 2030 climate target of cutting emissions by
40% compared to 1990 levels.

Acknowledging the dependence of economic activity on a healthy

environment and climate, the IMF has urged G20 countries to adopt a
carbon floor price for industries as the quickest way of reaching goals
under the Paris climate agreement. Striking a similar note, the new
Financial Sector Guide for the Convention on Biological Diversity has
underlined the role of the financial sector in curbing nature loss,
stressing ways for the sector to engage with, and align itself, with the
Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework expected to be brokered at
the CBD COP15 in Kunming, China.
ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE

The Panchayats (Extension to the

Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 was a historic
law passed 25 years ago to ensure
autonomous and decentralised
governance of tribal-majority areas in
India. Sumedha Pal argues for Newsclick
that the law has been reduced to a “toothless” regime. She also
highlights how the recent steps to dilute environmental and human
rights laws such as the Forest Rights Act, the Forest (Conservation) Act
and environmental clearance norms are in lockstep with moves for
increasing private sector participation in coal and mineral mining. This
poses serious threats to autonomy of indigenous communities, she
warns. The government’s recent announcement to amend the Indian
Forest Act to promote ease of doing business and economic growth in
the forestry sector, must be seen in this context.

Perhaps heeding to the demands of the power sector, MoEF&CC

has attempted to further relax fly ash disposal norms with its draft Fly
Ash Notification 2021. The draft has scant regard for the toxic impacts
of fly ash on humans and environment across the country which has
witnessed, in the past year alone, 17 major fly ash disasters, according
to a report by Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE) and
Health Energy Initiative India. Accentuating this race to the bottom, the
Union Cabinet has approved the Deep Ocean Mission which paves the
way for commercial deep sea mining while paying lip service to marine
biodiversity conservation and climate change studies.

At the global level, international lawyers have drafted the first-ever

legal definition of ‘ecocide’, proposing that it be the fifth international
crime to be tried under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court. As the official commentary to the definition explains, this includes
grave impacts on cultural resources, making explicit “the cultural value
of elements of the environment, particularly to indigenous peoples”.

COMMUNITIES & LIVELIHOODS

The intertwining of culture, livelihoods and

environmental protection is more clearly
evident in local issues. A group of
scientists have written to the Indian
President seeking his intervention to
withdraw the draft Lakshadweep
Development Authority Regulation, 2021, citing its detrimental impact
on Lakshadweep’s ecology, livelihood and culture. Manju Menon and
Ishita Chatterjee point out for The Wire that the recent orders of the
Supreme Court for eviction from low-income settlements in Khori Gaon
on protected Aravalli forest land only highlight the urgent need to
interweave the twin objectives of forest conservation and social
housing.

ENERGY

India and other Asian economies are

attracting criticism for pushing plans for
new coal-fired plants, at a time when calls
for a just energy transition through
rehabilitation of coal mining areas are
growing. At the same time, we must keep
in mind that even renewable energy has its own adverse impacts, and
cannot be infinitely sustained in a paradigm of limitless economic
growth. Vandana Singh and Chirag Dhara use the example of electric
vehicles to illustrate this point in Scientific American.
In India, large-scale solar parks are driving green capitalism and
having disturbing social impacts, with unfair, illegal and even violent
means often employed to acquire land. ESG has been at the forefront of
questioning this process, most recently as part of a fact-finding mission
on corporate land grab for a 15 MW solar plant in Nagaon, Assam.
Recently, the Rajasthan High Court also took due note of irregularities in
land transfer in 3 villages near Jaisalmer for an Adani solar venture,
cancelling allotments of 1452 bighas of land.

Centralised mega renewable energy projects also have their fair

share of environmental impacts. As we highlighted in our last newsletter,
they are threatening the survival of India’s grasslands, and the Great
Indian Bustard, a flagship grassland species. Ecology experts weigh in
on the issue in this podcast for The Economic Times. It has also
emerged that the MNRE, taking a cue from renewable energy
companies, has also decided to approach the Supreme Court seeking a
revision of its April order directing the companies to lay power lines
underground to protect the movement patterns of the large bird.

AGRICULTURE

Representatives from the unprecedented

farmers’ protest submitted a memorandum
to the Indian President on the 46th
anniversary of the imposition of the
Emergency, highlighting the “twin
challenges of saving our agriculture and
saving our democracy”. On the removal of stock limits through the
amended Essential Commodities Act, one of the three contentious farm
laws, SG Vombatkere describes for Countercurrents how this
amendment has left small farmers and consumers even more vulnerable
than before, and set the stage for corporatisation of agriculture.
Shweta Saini and Pulkit Khatri argue in The Print that a real-time
farm distress index powered by digitised data can go a long way in
solving agricultural problems. Before any such initiative, the State must
first address the apprehensions that have already been voiced by
farmers’ and civil rights collectives on recent moves to digitise
agricultural data.

On the other hand, a crucial unmet need of several farming

communities is survey and recognition of farmers’ land rights and
tenure. In a piece reminiscent of the solar land grabs mentioned above,
Mohit Rao writes for The Morning Context how land tenure insecurity in
“unsettled villages” in Karnataka’s Bellary has rendered farmers,
particularly those from lower caste and tribal communities, vulnerable to
exploitation by mining companies, and prevented them from claiming
rights under the Forest Rights Act.

The world’s first trial for GM rubber is now underway in Assam,

meant to create extreme weather resistant varieties. This comes a
decade after the Kerala government refused such trials in the state on
grounds that it is a threat to agro-biodiversity and human health. The
rubber board has sought to allay fears by highlighting that the gene
being manipulated is sourced from the rubber plant itself, a process
known as “cisgenesis”.

URBAN GOVERNANCE

Results from a recent official lake survey in

Bengaluru show that nearly 20% of lake land
in and around the city has been encroached.
Deccan Herald notes that past initiatives to
hold the real estate developers and conniving
officials to account have long been in limbo.
Unsurprisingly, a recent move to fell more
than 6,000 trees to rejuvenate a lake in the city (still open to public
comment) is also attracting questions on whether it will benefit the lake
or land grabbers.

As modern society grapples with how to manage and protect its

commons, perhaps it would do us well to remember stories like those of
the legendary Bengali Shudra widow Rashmoni who used the law of
private property to protect the waters of the Hooghly as a commons for
fishing rights--a feat that a grateful public remembers by naming the
Hoogly ‘Rani Rashmonir Jal’.

Regards,

Team ESG
Environment Support Group (Trust)
1572, 36th Cross, Ring Road
Banashankari II Stage
Bangalore 560070. INDIA
Tel: 91-80-26713560
Voice/Fax: 91-80-26713316

Website: esgindia.org
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