Department of Environmental Studies

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

Seasonal migration to cities is a common livelihood strategy for forest-fringe households in central India. Based on a previously collected household survey of 5000 villages across 500 forest-fringe villages in 32 districts of central India, we identify migration patterns over the last 5 years. Villages with seasonal workers are widely dispersed (75% of surveyed villages) and 81% of destination cities had reported COVID-19 cases at the beginning of the lockdown. Using a disease spread model to assess distancing strategies if returning migrants carry the virus to villages, we find that lenient restrictions for people within a village combined with maximal restrictions between villages could reduce the number of people exposed compared with moderate restrictions both within and between villages. Such a 'village bubble' strategy could reduce the risk of spread among vulnerable populations and requires that essential goods reach villages.

Current Science

Post-lockdown spread of COVID-19 from cities to vulnerable forest-fringe villages in Central India

India’s ‘nature writing’ has traditionally encompassed ecology, geography and sacrality, but it has often bypassed Dalit eco-literary traditions. This article discusses the eco-literary, by focusing on Dalits and their relationship to the earth. It perceives the earth as an important locus of Dalit individuation, carving them as a free, working community, prior to the bearing of burdens of caste, and thus revealing irreducible instances of rights and claims. Placing archives of Dalits and ecocriticism, novel and river, caste and commons in tandem with each other, the article reads a literary text, A River Called Titash, deeply, and delves into the layers of making of Dalit environments. Written by Adwaita Mallabarman, a poor Malo Dalit, and autobiographic in a wider sense, the novel weaves a complex narrative of nature, place, time and community at the turn of the twentieth century. It shows how Dalit environments comprise a unique set of analytic, where earth,

Man In India

DALIT ON EARTH: RIVER TITASH, MALO COMMONS AND CULTURAL AFFIRMATION

The Killing of Maya in a Lake: Caste, Culture and Nature

The language and practice of Marine spatial planning (MSP) is typically associated with state-led multi-sectoral planning efforts. Yet in countries like India, where the government is not yet promoting MSP, ocean space has already been divided using principles and practices that are characteristic of MSP elsewhere in the world. Instead of being initiated by the state, these MSP-like processes are initiated by international agencies when industries seek large-scale development of India's marine ecosystems. Although intended as an inclusive, holistic process to plan industrial development, this assemblage of MSP technologies, processes and practices mandated by international corporations produces a particular power relation through its rejection of local knowledge and insistence on data, for instance, in the form of discrete, geo-coded polygons. This paper argues that this form of MSP produces an ontological politics, despite emerging from seemingly rational, post-political and technocratic processes. Engaging with such politics is increasingly possible with access to geographical information systems and this, therefore, provides a novel space in which to engage in political struggle. The case of externally mandated MSP in India demonstrates that non-state actors can initiate MSP and therefore, opens the possibility for fishing communities, as non-state actors, to directly engage with the assemblage of practices that produce MSP.

World University root node

Maritime Studies

Assembling marine spatial planning in the global south: International agencies and the fate of fishing communities in India

Brahmanical Activism ac Eco-Casteism

Art in America

Blurred borders

Polluting Industries, Environment and Workers' Health (Module VII)

Rethinking fishing communities to safeguard life above water

This study evaluates local-scale drivers of shark harvests in India, one of the world's largest shark fishing nations. Focusing on key harbours in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, which together contribute 54% of India's shark harvest, this study uses a semi-structured survey to examine the practices of shark fishers and traders, their knowledge of shark trade and policy and perceptions of shark declines. Findings indicate that a domestic market for shark meat is presently the main local driver for harvests rather than the global trade in shark fins. Sharks are mostly non-target catch, landed whole, contributing to the protein needs of coastal communities. Consumer demand is the greatest for small-bodied and juvenile sharks. Perceived steep declines in shark numbers and sizes have had economic impacts on fishers and traders. The unregulated domestic market for shark meat is a key challenge requiring nuanced local approaches that diverge from global shark conservation priorities.

Ambio

Local drivers of declining shark fisheries in India

This article traces how substantive decision-making power over extractive projects is denied to India’s indigenous and forest-dwelling communities, even as they have clinched rights to ownership and consent under the landmark Forest Rights Act of 2006. By examining the consent mechanism provided under the act, we contend that the possibilities, and limits of such mechanisms are shaped by the larger architecture of the state-bureaucratic apparatus and practices that govern the process of transferring forests (“forest diversion” in bureaucratese) from rural communities to corporations. By analyzing a case of a forest diversion proposal for an iron ore mine in India’s resource-rich state of Odisha, we argue that consent provisions are derailed by “bureaucratic sabotage,” i.e. the power of corporations and state officials to control and manipulate the movement and circulation of documents through different tiers of government. In conclusion, we offer some thoughts on the weaknesses of the FPIC mechanism and the possible ways to address some of these. However, ultimately, the larger implication of such sabotage is the headlong collision between FPIC provisions and the principle of eminent domain. For FPIC to be meaningful, in India and globally, this fundamental contradiction must be confronted and resolved in favor of resource justice. © 2019, © 2019 The Center for Political Ecology.