#inde

Nous avancerons avec le peuple, clament un million de personnes à Kolkata

▻https://www.editoweb.eu/nicolas_maury/Nous-avancerons-nous-avancerons-avec-le-peuple-clame-un-million-de-personne

#Inde

Le drapeau rouge se lèvera-t-il à nouveau sur le Tamil Nadu ?

▻https://www.editoweb.eu/nicolas_maury/Le-drapeau-rouge-se-levera-t-il-de-nouveau-sur-le-Tamil-Nadu_a15573.html
#Inde #Communisme

Delhi, la bourgeoise
▻https://laviedesidees.fr/Delhi-la-bourgeoise.html

À propos de : Amita Baviskar, Uncivil City : Equity, Ecology and the Commons, Sage. Les efforts pour faire de Delhi une #ville « globale » s’accompagnent d’une destruction de la nature et des communs, ainsi que d’une relégation des pauvres à la périphérie. L’évolution de cette métropole témoigne du besoin urgent de concilier justice écologique et #justice_sociale.

#International #pauvreté #Inde #écologie #urbanisme
▻https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/pdf/20210218_zerah.pdf
▻https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/docx/20210218_zerah.docx

Crue subite en Inde : des corps retirés d’un tunnel, le bilan grimpe à 43 morts et 161 disparus
▻https://www.courrierinternational.com/depeche/crue-subite-en-inde-des-corps-retires-dun-tunnel-le-bilan-gri

Un mur d’eau s’est violemment abattu sur la vallée de Rishiganga dans l’Etat de l’Uttarakhand détruisant tout sur son passage. Le phénomène a été d’abord attribué à la rupture d’un glacier himalayen mais d’autres hypothèses sont envisagées, dont la formation d’un lac glaciaire, due à la fonte d’un glacier, dont les rives auraient cédé.

#climat #Inde

Dortoirs, cantines, crèches... Les paysans indiens révoltés créent une « république autonome » | Côme Bastin
▻https://reporterre.net/Dortoirs-cantines-creches-Les-paysans-indiens-revoltes-creent-une-republ

Malgré la répression de l’État, les fermiers en colère contre la libéralisation du secteur agricole n’ont jamais été aussi nombreux autour de la capitale indienne. Beaucoup ravitaillent la « république autonome » par rotations. Derrière la lutte contre la réforme honnie se dévoilent des décennies de ressentiment. Source : Reporterre

Inégalités mondialisées, l’avancée des big tech dans l’agriculture, l’exemple de l’Inde

Selon un nouveau rapport d’Oxfam, « The Inequality Virus », la richesse des milliardaires du monde entier a augmenté de 3,9 billions de dollars entre le 18 mars et le 31 décembre 2020. Leur richesse totale s’élève désormais à 11,95 milliards de dollars. Les dix milliardaires les plus riches du monde ont vu leur richesse s’accroître au total de 540 milliards de dollars au cours de cette période. En septembre 2020, Jeff Bezos aurait pu verser une prime de 105 000 dollars à l’ensemble des 876 000 employés d’Amazon et être toujours aussi riche qu’avant le covid.

▻https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.blog/2021/02/12/inegalites-mondialisees-lavancee-des-big-tech-dans-lagr

#international #inde

Le soulèvement paysan en Inde

Le premier ministre, #Narendra_Modi, péniblement élu à la tête d’une coalition conservatrice en 2014, cristallise toutes les colères. Depuis sa prise de fonctions, il a accentué la destruction de la protection étatique qui entourait les paysans, voie ouverte par la gauche dans les années 1990. Il a exacerbé les conflits entre les communautés religieuses. Sa politique réactionnaire contre la condition des femmes a également suscité des mouvements de contestation.

Tout s’arrête le 24 mars à cause du #Covid-19. Modi, dans la sidération générale, décide de privatiser tout, de la défense aux écoles, en passant par la santé et les transports. Avec un temps de retard, les grèves s’étendent dans le pays, métier par métier, Etat par Etat, sans trouver de réponse. Les femmes et les paysans imposent aux directions syndicales un appel à la #grève_générale le 26 novembre qui mobilisera 250 millions d’indiens . Et c’est de là que tout est parti.

Depuis deux mois, ils sont des centaines, des milliers et, maintenant, un million à avoir afflué aux portes de Delhi, la capitale indienne. Ils se sont organisés pour tenir ce siège et obtenir l’abrogation complète des lois ultralibérales.

Jacques Chastaing restitue les contexte de ces luttes, dans un entretien réalisé par les animatrices de l’émission L’Actualité des Luttes sur #Fréquence_Paris_Plurielle le 2 février 2021 (et repris sur #Radio_Zinzine le 7 février 2021).

L’INDE AUX PORTES DE NEW DELHI :
Entretien avec #Jacques_Chataing.

▻https://actualitedesluttes.info/linde-en-plein-soulevement

#paysan, #Inde, #Terre_&_Liberté !
Et aussi #occultation_des_luttes...

La lutte des ruraux en Inde, sous une perspective féministe

Archana Prasad a parlé à Capire du travail et de la vie des femmes en Inde et des luttes contre le pouvoir des entreprises et les politiques de droite

Lorsque le capitalisme
et le fondamentalisme se rejoignent,
la combinaison devient extrêmement fatale.

▻https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.blog/2021/02/09/la-lutte-des-ruraux-en-inde-sous-une-perspective-femini

#féminisme #inde

Les leçons de la lutte des agriculteurs indiens

Jamais un ‘Jour de la République’ n’avait connu autant de revendications publiques. Des centaines de milliers de paysans qui voulaient avoir leur mot à dire sur la Res Publica se sont spontanément retrouvés à manifester dans les rues de Delhi. Parmi toutes les excuses boiteuses destinées à arrêter la marche des paysans, il y en avait une qui ne manquait pas d’ironie. Que cette manifestation serait une « conspiration » visant à diffamer l’Inde aux yeux du monde en faisant un défilé de tracteurs dans la capitale le jour de la République. Les paysans en lutte ont prouvé, au contraire, qu’ils portaient haut la bannière de la « plus grande démocratie du monde » alors que le régime actuel est déterminé à piétiner et à supprimer toutes les valeurs démocratiques qui subsistent dans le pays.

▻https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.blog/2021/02/08/les-lecons-de-la-lutte-des-agriculteurs-indiens

#international #inde

India cracks down on journalism, again - Columbia Journalism Review
▻https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/india_modi_farmers_protests_journalism.php

Last Tuesday, as India celebrated a national holiday commemorating its democratic constitution, thousands of farmers marched and drove their tractors through New Delhi. It was the latest in a series of protests against agricultural reforms that many farmers fear will allow large corporations to crush them. Police tear-gassed the demonstrators and charged at the crowd with batons; as Vidya Krishnan wrote in The Atlantic, “the dueling images—a celebration of India’s democracy on the one hand, the crushing of dissent on the other—were carried on a split screen by many news channels, inadvertently offering the perfect visual metaphor for modern India.” A twenty-five-year-old farmer named Navreet Singh was killed during the protest; officials claimed that he died in a tractor accident, but witnesses said that police shot Singh in the head—an account supported by photographic evidence. Singh’s family has alleged a cover-up. “One doctor told me that my grandson was hit by a gunshot,” Hardip Singh Dibdiba, Singh’s grandfather, told The Guardian, “but said they could not write that a bullet killed him.”

Indian authorities have since filed sedition and other charges against at least nine journalists who reported on, or merely tweeted about, Singh’s death and the protests; some members of the press have been subjected to extrajudicial harassment and threats. Under Indian law, sedition carries a possible penalty of life imprisonment. The editors of two prominent independent news outlets—Vinod K. Jose, of the magazine The Caravan, and Siddharth Varadarajan, of the news website The Wire—were among those charged. On Saturday, police detained two more reporters—Mandeep Punia, a Caravan contributor, and Dharmender Singh, of Online News India—as they covered ongoing farmers’ protests in New Delhi. Kanwardeep Singh, a reporter with the Times of India, told The Guardian that his phone is under surveillance. The government, he believes, is trying to send him a message: “Either I stop writing and stay safe or be ready to live my remaining life behind the bars.”

Masthead - Columbia Journalism Review
▻https://www.cjr.org/about_us/masthead.php

Columbia Journalism Review is published by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Dean
Steve Coll

Chairman
Stephen Adler

Editor in Chief and Publisher
Kyle Pope

Managing Editor
Betsy Morais

Digital Editor
Ravi Somaiya

Senior Editor
Brendan Fitzgerald

Staff Writer and Senior Delacorte Fellow
Alexandria Neason

Chief Digital Writer
Mathew Ingram

The Media Today
Jon Allsop

Contributing Editor
Camille Bromley

Delacorte Fellows
Akintunde Ahmad, Lauren Harris, and Savannah Jacobson

Communications and Design
Darrel Frost

Website Development
Michael Murphy

Print Design
Point Five, NY

#Inde #répression #journalisme #modi

Global democracy has a very bad year

https://i.imgur.com/dnPqsau.png

Inde : Modi dans ses basses œuvres

Ségrégation des musulmans, criminalisation des dissidents

Il ne fallait pas être devin pour prédire la menace existentielle que représenterait le gouvernement de Narendra Modi pour la trame de l’Inde. Depuis son élection en 2014, l’homme fort du pays a asséné ses coups, sans relâche ni concessions, pour bâtir sa « Nouvelle Inde », visant à assimiler la nation et l’identité indienne à la seule majorité hindoue. La démocratie se meurt, la Constitution expire.

L’Inde est un pays où l’on incite à la haine, où l’on assassine de sang-froid, en toute impunité. L’État, qui se veut plus hindou qu’indien, s’arc-boute sur des privilèges et des pouvoirs pour défendre ses intérêts et concrétiser ses fantasmes.

▻https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.blog/2021/02/04/inde-modi-dans-ses-basses-oeuvres

#international #inde

Face au nationalisme hindou de Modi, les agriculteurs protestataires se réapproprient l’idée de la nation anti-coloniale

Mais en Inde, à l’heure actuelle, les agriculteurs ne souhaitent pas se détourner des cultures vivrières, alors que les consommateurs veulent que les cultures vivrières soient fournies par le système de distribution public. Il n’y a donc pas de conflit d’intérêts entre eux que le gouvernement devrait arbitrer. Et pourtant, ce gouvernement [Modi] veut imposer aux agriculteurs un passage des cultures vivrières aux cultures de rente qui détruirait le système de distribution public.

▻https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.blog/2021/01/30/face-au-nationalisme-hindou-de-modi-les-agriculteurs-pr

#international #inde

Is the China-India Border Dispute Shifting East? – The Diplomat
▻https://thediplomat.com/2021/01/is-the-china-india-border-dispute-shifting-east

https://thediplomat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/sizes/td-story-s-2/thediplomat-2021-01-26-9.jpg

China and India’s antagonism along the Himalayas is a centuries-old story. Both countries want a fixed boundary line in the Himalayas; yet the physical geography, cultural landscape, and political history of the world’s greatest mountain range has made any straightforward demarcation impossible.

Beginning in the 1840s, an array of British surveyors, generals, and administrators attempted to fix a border between India, Russia, and China’s still-expanding empires. These attempts were challenged by the topographical complexity of the massive Himalayas and the imperial insistence on the elegant “watershed principle” to guide their boundary line. Limited surveying compounded the complex geography and resulted in major segments of the would-be border remaining undefined at the time of independence in 1947.

#chine #inde Frontière #conflit

#Jammu (Inde) : résistance à une opération de démolition-expulsion
▻https://fr.squat.net/2021/01/25/jammu-inde-resistance-a-une-operation-de-demolition-expulsion

Vendredi 22 janvier 2021, des #émeutes ont éclaté à Jammu, entre des habitant·e·s menacé·e·s d’expulsion et l’administration du Jammu-et-Cachemire quand des employés de cette dernière ont commencé à démolir des logements et expulser des gens, avec l’aide de la police. Squatters, habitant·e·s de bidonville, visé·e·s par cette opération d’expulsion-démolition, ont caillassé les expulseurs, tentant de […]

#Asie #expulsion #Inde

Les paysan⋅ne⋅s du monde entier s’unissent ! Ce 26 janvier, allumez une bougie en solidarité avec les paysan⋅ne⋅s de l’Inde

https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/india_fr-1245x2048-1.jpg

Depuis plus de 50 jours maintenant, les paysan⋅ne⋅s et les travailleurs indiens organisent des manifestations massives dans la capitale nationale du pays, New Delhi. Ils sont aussi présent⋅e⋅s à plusieurs frontières interétatiques et centres de district, exhortant leur gouvernement national à revenir sur trois législations controversées qui sont censées industrialiser le paysage agricole indien.

▻https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.blog/2021/01/25/les-paysan⋅ne⋅s-du-monde-entier-sunissent-ce-26-janvier

#international #inde

Comment organiser une journée #sans_voiture
▻http://carfree.fr/index.php/2021/01/25/comment-organiser-une-journee-sans-voiture

L’association CODATU (Coopération pour le Développement et l’Amélioration des Transports Urbains et Périurbains) a réalisé en 2018 un petit #guide pratique de l’organisation d’une journée sans voiture, document indispensable pour Lire la suite...

#Alternatives_à_la_voiture #Fin_de_l'automobile #Guides #Marche_à_pied #Quartiers_sans_voitures #Ressources #Transports_publics #Vélo #Vie_sans_voiture #Ville_sans_voitures #inde #journée_sans_voitures #Solutions #Tunisie #ville

Les sénateurs, payés 7200 € par mois, refusent d’étendre le RSA aux 18-25 ans
►https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20210121.OBS39148/le-senat-refuse-d-etendre-le-rsa-aux-18-25-ans-la-gauche-denonce-une-gifl

Covid-19: Over Two Million Around the World Have Died From the Virus - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/15/world/covid19-coronavirus

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/15/world/15virus-briefing-2-million-deaths-worldwide2/merlin_182211213_df7ba52b-25f1-47fd-9cfd-e0458aea31d4-facebookJumbo.jpg

As India prepares to begin an ambitious coronavirus vaccination program this weekend, more than 700,000 Hindu pilgrims gathered to take a dip in the Ganges River on Thursday, the start of the Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious gatherings in the world.The faithful who traveled to Haridwar, the holy town at the foothills of the Himalayas that is the site of this year’s pilgrimage, said a dip in the freezing waters will cleanse them of their sins and provide blessings that extend through several generations.
The authorities said that about 1,000 people had been fined for not wearing masks or maintaining social distance, but Sanjay Gunjyal, a police official monitoring the crowd, acknowledged the difficulty of trying to enforce the rules. “In a limited space, crowd management and maintaining social distancing is extremely difficult,” he said.India has recorded at least 10.5 million coronavirus cases — the world’s second-highest total after that of the United States — although the South Asian nation’s outbreak is widely believed to be worse than the official figures suggest.At least 2,500 security personnel were stationed along the river, where Covid-19 testing centers were set up and attendees’ fevers were being checked.“Their belief system was paramount and not the fear to catch Covid,” said Manoj Singh Negi, a spokesman for the police department monitoring the event. “That they got to touch the holy waters was the overriding sentiment.”

#Covid-19#migrant#migration#inde#sante#religion#pelerinage#migrationinterne

Coronavirus : des places pour tout le monde | Aurélie Lanctôt
▻https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/593330/des-places-pour-tout-le-monde

La réponse actuelle à la pandémie s’appuie de façon béate sur les approches policières — de la surveillance faite par la police elle-même jusqu’à l’incitation à se dénoncer entre voisins. Elle ignore la santé et la sécurité de personnes parmi les plus vulnérables de notre société, et révèle ainsi combien nous sommes à l’aise avec les stratégies qui consistent à nettoyer l’espace public de ses éléments jugés indésirables. Source : Le Devoir

Comment l’Inde prend l’eau
▻https://laviedesidees.fr/Comment-l-Inde-prend-l-eau.html

À propos de : Marie-Hélène Zérah, Quand L’Inde s’urbanise : Services essentiels et paradoxes d’un #urbanisme bricolé, Editions de l’Aube. Le rythme galopant de l’urbanisation va de pair avec l’incapacité de l’Inde à fournir les services de base à l’ensemble des citadins. Quand les pouvoirs publics concentrent les grands projets dans les mégalopoles, les petites villes bricolent des solutions hétéroclites, renforçant la ségrégation.

#International #ville #Inde #pollution
▻https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/docx/202101_inde-2.docx
▻https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/pdf/20210114_inde.pdf

EN INDE, LA PLUS GROSSE GRÈVE DE L’HISTOIRE MONDIALE
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gAYhimKGw

Des #chercheurs sur le #nucléaire s’inquiètent après le #licenciement d’une spécialiste de Fukushima
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2021/01/06/nucleaire-des-chercheurs-s-inquietent-apres-le-licenciement-d-une-specialist

"Spécialiste de la catastrophe de #Fukushima, Christine Fassert a été renvoyée pour faute en juin 2020, au motif d’une « insubordination récurrente » et d’un « comportement inadapté », comme l’a révélé en septembre Le Canard enchaîné. Elle affirme que le conflit avec sa hiérarchie est lié aux résultats de ses travaux de recherche, ce que l’IRSN, l’expert public des risques nucléaires et radiologiques, bras technique de l’Autorité de sûreté nucléaire, conteste fermement.

Socio-anthropologue, Christine Fassert est embauchée en 2012 par l’IRSN, qui vient alors de créer un #laboratoire des #sciences_humaines_et_sociales. Le projet Shinrai – « confiance », en japonais –, lancé en partenariat avec Sciences Po Paris et l’université japonaise Tokyo Tech, vise à étudier les conséquences sociales et politiques de l’accident de la centrale de Fukushima de mars 2011. En cinq ans, Christine Fassert et Reiko Hasegawa, chercheuse anciennement rattachée à Sciences Po, réalisent près de 130 entretiens au #Japon auprès des évacués rentrés ou non chez eux, de représentants du gouvernement ou d’associations.

Dès la #publication des premiers articles, Christine Fassert affirme avoir subi des tentatives d’obstruction de sa hiérarchie, qui demande des modifications ou l’empêche de participer à plusieurs colloques. « Quand nos analyses ne correspondaient pas à ce que l’IRSN voulait entendre, ils essayaient de nous imposer des changements, assure Reiko Hasegawa. Ils nous demandaient d’enlever des phrases entières, c’était des pratiques totalement inhabituelles dans le milieu de la recherche. »

Selon les deux chercheuses, un passage indiquant que la population japonaise a perdu confiance envers les autorités, par exemple, devait être modifié. Impossible également d’écrire que, à la suite de l’accident, les Japonais se sont prononcés lors d’un débat public en faveur de la sortie du nucléaire, et que le résultat est le même à chaque fois que les populations sont consultées à travers le monde. Parmi les sujets sensibles figureraient aussi la question du retour des évacués et celle de la dangerosité de l’exposition à de faibles doses de radioactivité, qui suscite une importante controverse scientifique. Après l’accident de Fukushima, le gouvernement japonais a fait passer la dose limite pour le public de 1 millisievert (mSv) par an au niveau du seuil de référence maximum, soit 20 mSv/an, la politique de retour dans les zones évacuées étant établie sur cette limite.

En 2019, la publication de deux #articles de Christine Fassert est refusée. L’un porte sur la gouvernance des risques et repose sur des entretiens avec des #experts critiques du nucléaire et sur le rapport dit « Pompili », sur les fragilités du parc nucléaire français ; le second démontre que les citoyens japonais font davantage confiance à l’expertise associative qu’à l’expertise institutionnelle. « Est-ce que, en cas d’#accident en France, les citoyens feront plus confiance à la Commission de #recherche et d’information indépendantes sur la radioactivité (#Criirad) et à l’Association pour le contrôle de la radioactivité dans l’Ouest (ACRO), ou à l’IRSN ? La question n’est peut-être pas agréable à entendre, mais elle est réelle », assure Christine Fassert."

Keep Out... Come Again. The underbelly of American-styled conservation in the Indian Himalayas.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50769633212_b9eb3cce77_b.jpg

IN DECEMBER, THE ROAD leading to the #Tirthan_Valley entrance archway of the #Great_Himalayan_National_Park (#GHNP), a #UNESCO World Heritage site in India’s mountain state of Himachal Pradesh, is a potholed mudslide: For miles, a fleet of excavators and tunnel-boring machines are lopping and drilling the mountains to widen and extend the highway. Most of the traffic passing through a big, dark tunnel blasted through the mountain is headed to Manali — the mass-tourist hub of the Western Himalayas, about an hour’s drive farther north.

My partner and I pass through the archway and weave the motorcycle along a cliffside road into the gorgeous, narrow valley. Villages and orchards dot the ridges. The first snow is melting off the roofs, and far below the Tirthan River runs free and fast. This is still the off-beaten path. But around every turn, we see signs that development is on the rise. Guesthouses, campsites, cottages, hotels, and resorts are sprouting up outside the park’s boundaries. Trucks carrying construction material drive traffic off onto the shoulder. On the opposite ridge, a new helipad access road is being carved out. The area appears to be under construction, not conservation.

It seems that by putting this once little-known national park on the global map, conservationists have catalyzed a massive wave of development along its border. And ecotourism, though ostensibly a responsible form of development, looks over here, as one researcher put it, more like “old wine in a new bottle.”

In the two decades since it was formed, the park has displaced over 300 people from their land, disrupted the traditional livelihoods of several thousand more, and forced yet more into dependence on a risky (eco)tourism industry run in large part by outside “experts.” In many ways, the GHNP is a poster child of how the American national park model — conceived at Yellowstone and exported to the Global South by a transnational nexus of state and nonstate actors, continues to ignore the sociopolitical and cultural realities of a place. As a result, protected areas around the world continue to yield pernicious impacts on local communities, and, to some extent, on the local ecology as well. It also raises the question: If protecting one piece of land requires moving its long-time human residents out, developing adjacent land, and flying in tourists from around the world — what is actually being conserved?

IN THE EARLY 1980s, at the invitation of the Himachal government, a team of Indian and international wildlife biologists led by a British researcher named Tony Gaston surveyed the Western Himalayas for a possible location for the state’s first national park. The state government had been eyeing the Manali area, but after a broad wildlife survey, Gaston’s team recommended the Upper Tirthan and Sainj valleys instead.

The ecosystem was less disturbed, home to more wildlife, and thus had “excellent potential for attracting tourists”— especially foreign tourists — who might constitute both a “substantial source of [park] revenues” as well as “an enormous input to the local economy,” the team’s report said.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50769635527_5498a25ae4_b.jpg

The proposed 754.4-square-kilometer park included the upper mountain glacial and snow melt water source origins of the Jiwa Nal, Sainj Tirthan, and Parvati rivers, which are all headwater tributaries to the Beas River and subsequently, the Indus River. Given its location at the junction of two of the world’s major biogeographic realms — the Palearctic and Indomalayan — its monsoon-fed forests and alpine meadows sustain a diversity of plant, moss, lichen, bird, and mammal species, many of which are endemic, including the Himalayan goral, blue sheep, and the endangered western Tragopan pheasant and musk deer.

The park’s boundary was strategically drawn so that only four villages needed to be relocated. But this glossed over the problem of resource displacement. To the northwest, the proposed park was buffered by high mountain systems that include several other national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, but the land in and around its southwest boundary was home to about 150 villages with a total population of at least 11,000 people, all of whom were officially dispossessed of the forests they depended on for centuries when the Indian government inaugurated The Great Himalayan National Park in 1999. These villages are now part of a 265.6-square-kilometer buffer, or so-called “ecozone,” leading into the park.

A large majority of these families were poor. Many of them cultivated small parcels of land that provided subsistence for part of the year, and they relied on a variety of additional resources provided by the forestlands in the mountains around their homes to meet the rest of their food and financial requirements. That included grazing sheep and goats in the alpine meadows, extracting medicinal herbs that they could sell to the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry, and collecting gucchi, or morel mushrooms, that fetched high prices in international markets.

“IN THE INDIAN CONTEXT, the notion that you can have a landscape that is pristine and therefore devoid of humans is an artificial creation,” says Dr. Vasant Saberwal, a wildlife biologist and director of the Centre for Pastoralism, an organization based in Gujarat state that aims to enhance our understanding of pastoralist ecosystems. “India has [long] been a heavily populated country. So, when you think of alpine meadows at 15,000 feet above sea-level, they have been used by pastoral communities for several hundred years. You cannot now go into those landscapes and say we want a pristine alpine meadow. There’s no such thing.”

In keeping with the lingering idea, tracing back to early American conservationism, that pastoral societies destroy their own land, the Gaston team’s original report claimed that firewood collecting, hunting, and especially overgrazing, were degrading habitat within the area. It recommended a ban on grazing and medicinal plant collection in order to maintain the park’s biodiversity.

https://www.earthisland.org/images/uploads/herdHookah.jpg

But Saberwal’s research shows that grazing practices in the park’s high alpine meadows — which constitute almost half the park’s area — were likely necessary to maintain its high levels of herb diversity. Before the area was closed off to people, traditional herders of the Indigenous Gaddi tribe would travel up to the alpine meadows with about 35,000 sheep and goats entrusted to them by individual families, and graze them in these meadows for six snow-free months from April through September.

“So, when you talk to people and suggest to people that their use of the park leads to degradation, they say that we have been using these resources for the past 150-200 years,” he says. “They say, if our presence here has been such a threat, then why would there be biological diversity here?”

Saberwal’s findings are consistent with reams of scholarship in recent years documenting how local and Indigenous communities, without external pressures, live convivially with nature.

That is not to say that external pressures aren’t impacting the region. There has definitely been an uptick in morel and medicinal herbs extraction from the park area, especially since the early 1990s when India “liberalized” its economy. Yet today, without adequate enforcement, it remains unclear just how much the park actually helped curtail extraction of these herbs or instead just forced the market underground.

Other threats include poaching, human-wildlife conflicts, and hydropower development. Ironically, a 10-square-kilometer area was deleted from the original map of the GHNP for building of a hydro-power project, underscoring a typical approach towards conservation “wherein local livelihoods are expendable in the interests of biodiversity, but biodiversity must make way for national development,” Saberwal says.

India’s Wildlife Protection Act, which prohibits all human activities within a national park, does recognize people’s traditional rights to forest resources. It therefore requires state governments settle or acquire these rights prior to finalizing a new national park’s boundaries, either through financial compensation or by providing people alternative land where such rights can be exercised. But India’s record of actually honoring these rights has been sketchy at best. In GHNP’s case, the state chose to offer financial compensation to only about 300 of the 2,300 or so impacted households, based on family names listed in a colonial report with census data for the area dating back to 1894. It eventually provided the rest of the villagers alternative areas to graze their livestock, but this land was inadequate and nutrient-poor compared to the grasses in the high alpine meadows. Only a handful of families in these villages still have sheep and goat herds today.

Saberwal, and many mainstream conservationists, says there is an argument to be made for allowing villagers into the park, and not only because it supports their livelihoods. “The presence of people with a real stake in the biological resources of the park can also lead to far greater levels of support for effective management of the park, including better monitoring of who goes into the park, for what, and at what times of the year. Poaching could be more effectively controlled, as could the excessive extraction of medicinal herbs,” he says.

DESPITE STIFF LOCAL RESISTANCE, the forest department — with support from an international nonprofit called Friends of GHNP, as well as the World Bank, which chipped in a $2.5 million loan — developed an ecotourism industry in the area to help local communities adapt.

Eco-development, of course, is the current cool idea for making exclusionary conservation acceptable. On paper, it requires community involvement to create “alternative livelihoods” to reduce locals’ dependence on a park’s resources. So, with the support of Friends of GHNP, the forest department helped form a street theater group. It developed firewood and medicinal herb plantations in an effort to wean villagers off of foraging for these the park. A women’s savings and credit collective called Sahara was set up to produce vermicompost, apricot oil, and handicrafts. The Forest Department also handed out “doles” — stoves, handlooms, televisions, pressure cookers — what Mark Dowie, in his book Conservation Refugees, calls “cargo conservation,” or the exchange of commodities for compliance.

Yet, the project was mired in corruption and mismanagement. The male director of the women’s collective, for instance, was discovered to be siphoning off the collective’s funds. Meanwhile, local ecodevelopment committees set up to coordinate expenditure on livelihood projects were run by the most powerful people in the villages, usually upper-caste males of the devta (deity) community, and chose to spend the money on things like temple and road repairs. According to a 2001 study of the ecodevelopment project, 70 percent of the funds were spent on infrastructure initiatives of this kind. Much later, in 2002, in an attempt to distance itself from the program, the World Bank concluded ecodevelopment had left “very little or no impact … on the ground.”

In 2014, the park, along with the adjacent Sainj and Tirthan wildlife sanctuaries, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, again in spite of more protests from the impacted local communities. Friends of GHNP wrote the application.

If creating the park cracked the door to development in the Tirthan Valley, minting it a UNESCO World Heritage site flung it wide open.

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On the economic front, it’s certainly true that the influx of tourists has injected more money into the Tirthan Valley than ever before. And it’s true, too, that many locals, the youth especially, are excited, or at least hopeful, that the industry will improve their lives and alleviate poverty. But on the whole, locals are losing opportunities to outside entrepreneurs who come with deeper pockets, digital marketing savvy, and already established networks of potential clientele.

“That kind of investment and marketing involvement is difficult for locals for figure out,” says Manashi Asher, a researcher with Himdhara, a Himachal-based environmental research and action collective. “Basically, what many locals have done instead, is circumvent local ecotourism policies by turning their properties into homestay or other kinds of [tourist] lodgings and leasing them out to outsiders to run.”

Though there are no official estimates yet, there’s a consensus among locals that outsider-run guesthouses have already cornered a majority of the valley’s tourism revenue. “City-based tourism operators are licking out the cream, while the peasantry class and unemployed youth earn a pittance from the seasonal, odd jobs they offer,” Dilaram Shabab, the late “Green Man” of Tirthan Valley who spearheaded successful movements against hydropower development on the Tirthan river, wrote in his book Kullu: The Valley of Gods.

When I read this quote to Upendra Singh Kamra, a transplant from the northwestern state of Punjab who runs a tourism outfit for fishing enthusiasts called Gone Fishing Cottages, he emphasizes how, unlike at most properties, they don’t lay off their local staff during low season. Some have even bought motorcycles or cars. “Logically, you have nothing and then you have something and then you’re complaining that something is not enough. So it doesn’t make sense for me.”

Many locals see it differently. Narotham Singh, a veteran forest guard, told me he leased his land for 30 years, but now worries for his son and grandchildren. “If they don’t study, what they’re going to be doing is probably cleaning utensils and sweeping in the guesthouses of these people. That’s the dark future.” Karan Bharti, one of Shabab’s grandsons, told me many youth are so ashamed to work as servants on their own land that they’re fleeing the valley altogether.

More broadly, tourism is also a uniquely precarious industry. Global market fluctuations and environmental disasters frequently spook tourists away for years. (The Western Himalayas is primed for an 8.0-plus magnitude quake tomorrow). And when destination hotspots flip cold, once self-reliant shepherds turned hoteliers are left holding the bill for that high-interest construction loan.

Sadly, this is exactly what’s happened. In Himachal, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed just how dependent the state has become on tourism. After the borders were shut in late March, pressure to reopen to salvage a piece of the summer high season was palpable in the press. Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur proposed Himachal advertise itself for “Quarantine Tourism.” The hotel unions shot down the idea as absurd.

THERE’S NO SIGN NOR ROAD to Raju’s Guesthouse. To get to it, you have to cross the Tirthan River in a cable basket or makeshift plank bridge and climb up the opposite bank into a fairytale. Vines climb the dark wood facade. There are flowers, fruit trees, and a fire pit. When I visit, kittens are playing around an old cherry tree and a pack of dogs bark up the steep south face; leopards, I learn, come over the ridge at night sometimes and steal dogs.

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Raju, in his late sixties, toothpick-thin, and wearing a baseball cap, is the pioneer of ecotourism in Tirthan Valley. He is also Shabab’s son. When I first spoke with him on the phone, he called the park an “eyewash.” What he meant was that most people don’t come to the park for the park. It’s a steep, half-day trek just to the official boundary, and, inside, the trails aren’t marked. Most tourists are content with a weekend kickback at a guesthouse in the ecozone.

Still, if real ecotourism exists, Raju’s comes as close as I’ve ever seen. Food scraps are boiled down and fed to the cows. There’s fishing and birding and trekking on offer. No corporate groups allowed, even though that’s where the big bucks are. And no fume-expelling diesel generator, despite guests’ complaints after big storms. There’s a feeling of ineffable wholesomeness that has kept people coming back year after year, for decades now.

In a 1998 report titled “Communtity-Based Ecotourism in the GHNP,” a World Bank consultant was so impressed by Raju’s that she recommended it be “used as a model for the whole area.” But this was a consultant’s fantasy. Rather than provide support to help locals become owners in the tourism industry, the government and World Bank offered them tour guide, portering, and cooking training. Today, similar second-tier job trainings are part of an $83 million project funded by the Asian Development Bank to develop tourism (mainly by building parking lots) across Himachal.

Varun, one of Raju’s two sons who runs the guesthouse, doesn’t think any tourist property in the area is practicing ecotourism, even his own. People are illegally catching trout for guests’ dinners, cutting trees for their bonfires, and dumping their trash into the river, he says.

In 2018, Varun founded the Tirthan Conservation and Tourism Development Association (▻https://www.facebook.com/Tirthan-conservation-and-tourism-development-association-101254861218173), a union of local guesthouses that works to “eliminate the commercialization of our neighborhood and retain the aura of the valley.” They do tree plantings, enforce camping bans around the river, and meet regularly to discuss new developments in the valley.

Yet, Varun doesn’t see any way of stopping the development wave. “I mean, it’s inevitable. No matter how much you resist, you know, you’ll have to accept it. The only thing is, we can delay it, slow it down.”

▻https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/keep-out...come-again
#Inde #montagne #conservation_de_la_nature #nature #protection_de_la_nature #parc_national #Himachal_Pradesh #Manali #tourisme #colonialisme #néo-colonialisme #circulation_des_modèles #Hymalayah #Jiwa_Nal #Sainj_Tirthan #Parvati #rivières #Beas_River #paysage #conservationnisme #biodiversité #Gaddi #élevage #ressources #exploitation_des_ressources #Friends_of_GHNP #banque_mondiale #éco-tourisme #écotourisme #cargo_conservation #corruption #devta #deity #éco-développement #développement #World_Heritage_site #énergie_hydroélectrique #Asian_Development_Bank #Tirthan_Conservation_and_Tourism_Development_Association

#ressources_pédagogiques

#Covid-19 Was Consuming India, Until Nearly Everyone Started Wearing Masks - WSJ
▻https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-was-consuming-india-until-nearly-everyone-started-wearing-masks-116093

NEW DELHI—In September, India was reporting almost 100,000 Covid-19 cases a day, with many predicting it would soon pass the U.S. in overall cases. Instead, its infections dropped and are now at one-fourth that level.

India has brought down its virus numbers, despite often being too crowded for social distancing, having too many cases for effective contact tracing and an economy that isn’t well equipped to weather long lockdowns.

One of the main reasons, Indian health officials say, is that the country has managed to encourage and enforce almost universal acceptance of masks without much debate.

#Inde #masques