Measured against the high principles of justice that some of the judges of this country are capable of upholding even in the face of an increasingly authoritarian state, the Justice Roopanwal report is a travesty.
Reviewing the manner in which tribal lands in the Araku Valley of Visakhapatnam district have been encroached upon by mining companies, this article argues that the various routes through which the commons are being eroded signal the urgent need for improving our models of the commons. This will help devise better vocabularies and strategies for a livelihoods-based approach to ecological conservation as opposed to an accumulation-based one.
Why would farmers keep their own land fallow as part of a voluntary "crop holiday protest movement" in a part of Andhra Pradesh is a question that has puzzled many. A field visit to the Konaseema region reveals that the dynamics of class contradictions in the area are also responsible for the nature of the movement that goes beyond the issue of remunerative prices.
We, the teachers at the University of Hyderabad, strongly oppose all moves by the university administration to alienate and gift away more than 1,000 acres out of the 2,324 acres of land that were granted to the university by the Andhra Pradesh government in 1974.
Deepak Nayyar in his article on ‘Globalisation: What Does It Mean for Higher Education?’ (December 15, 2007) has stressed the importance of the influence of commercialisation and globalisation on the education sector and alerted us to the grave dangers therein.
