Who’s encroaching? Noida eyes the Yamuna floodplain
Noida eyes the Yamuna floodplain
About 1,000 migrants lost their livelihood when their huts and crops on the Yamuna floodplain near the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border were razed in December. The Uttar Pradesh Irrigation Department carried out the operation on a 25-hectare (ha) patch of the floodplain at Nayabaans village in Noida so that it can transfer the land to Noida for development.
The settlers were from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. They grew vegetables, flowers, wheat and rice on the land rented from people who once held land lease given by the irrigation department. Pappu of Kaimur district in Bihar had rented about 6 ha at Nayabaans close to the Okhla Bird Park and DND flyway for Rs 6,000 per hectare for a year. While he farmed, his younger siblings studied in a makeshift school. He lost his month-old vegetable crop and has nowhere to go.
“They just came in the evening and trampled all over the vegetables and flooded the fields. Had they at least given us a notice we would not have sown crops. I had invested Rs 15,000-20,000 on wheat.”
said Sauraj Singh Kashyap of Hapur in Uttar Pradesh. H C Malhotra, a member of literacy organization Gyan Jyoti Vidyalaya, which set up the makeshift school in the area, said “These people have not made permanent structures on the riverbed. They were merely making a living out of agriculture.” Continue reading »
Filed under Delhi, India, News, Rivers | Tags: Agriculture, Delhi, Development, Farmers, Infrastructure Development, Irrigation, Land, Land Encroachments, Land Use, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, Yamuna | Comment (0)Just a Lament – Pollution in Yamuna
Biking along the Yamuna from Delhi to Agra, Ravleen Kaur hears constant calls for saving the river, but witnesses little action. Photographs by Vaibhav Raghunandan.
The roaring of motorcycles shattered the early morning calm on the Yamuna floodplains in Delhi. On World Environment Day on June 5, a group of professionals, farmers, activists and journalists gathered for a bike rally along the river at the Yamuna Satyagraha site, where a bunch of farmers and activists have been campaigning against the construction of the Commonwealth Games Village on the riverbed for over 300 days.
As the river drifted into Faridabad its burden of sewage and industrial waste kept on increasing and the spectacular failure of the Yamuna Action Plan began to unfold.
In Dhadhasiya, 40 km from Delhi, a sewage treatment plant (stp) of 20 million litre per day capacity sprawled over 7 hectares made a great showpiece of the plan, but it was shut down for upgradation. Untreated sewage was being discharged into the river. “Who is interested in knowing where their daily muck is going?” said the stp contractor with a shrug. Even when the plant functions, it treats the sewage only partially. In not even one place we visited, stps were functional. Continue reading »
RTI (Right To Information) Assessment
An 85-year-old lady was having problems getting her passport. She needed it to go and live with her children abroad. The status, the website showed, was delivered. Visits to the passport office yielded little results. “We helped her draft a right to information (RTI) application. When the department concerned was informed of the application, she got the passport immediately,’ says Shekhar Singh of National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (ncpri), Delhi. But not all RTI applications are as smooth and appeals against disclosures are common. The RTI Act, which came into existence three years ago, is now undergoing a review of its performance. Here too, the issue has triggered a debate on the agency conducting the appraisal.
The department of personnel and training (DOPT) under the Union Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions has commissioned international accounting firm PriceWaterhouse Coopers the responsibility to review the RTI Act 2005. Activists say the study may end up protecting government officials. They are conducting a parallel study on how far the RTI has been able to keep up its mandate of providing timely response to “citizens requests for government information’. Continue reading »
Filed under India, News | Tags: * Government Of India (GOI), Andhra Pradesh, Assam, India, Information, Maharashtra, NGO, Orissa, Right To Information (RTI), Uttar Pradesh | Comment (0)Custard Apples belong to South America, or India?
Custard Apples belong to South America. A recent excavation in a small town in Uttar Pradesh has unearthed custard apple seeds there. The seeds date to the Neolithic era—3rd-2nd century bc. Is it possible then that there existed some kind of communication between India and South America?
Researchers who carried out the study say yes. “We found one whole seed and three to four broken seeds,’ says A Pokharia of Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleoethnobotany, Lucknow. The study was carried out in Tokwa, an archaeologically important site in Mirzapur district. The seeds had heavy carbon coating. Based on radiocarbon dates of other Neolithic sites in the region, the author concluded that the seeds belonged to the 3rd-2nd century bc. The study was published in Current Science (Vol 94, No 2).
There are other studies that say that the Portuguese introduced custard apples in the East in the 16th century ad. Pokharia refutes such claims. Continue reading »
Filed under Agriculture, India, News | Tags: History, Horticulture, India, Mirzapur, Seeds, South America, Uttar Pradesh | Comment (0)