Environmental, Social Justice & Governance Initiatives
Hon’ble Members of Parliament (Rajya Sabha): Between 11 pm on 30th July 2023 (Sunday) and 10 am today, over 1500
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The contents of Forest Conservation Bill 2023 leave no room for doubt that its core purpose is to advance interests of extractive industries, to commercialise forests, and favour Indian and foreign corporates interested in exploiting forests, biodiversity, bioresources and associated traditional knowledge.
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In light of the controversial statement in Parliament by Ministry of Tribal Affairs on Forest Conservation Act (Amendment) Bill, 2023, Rajya Sabha must apply brakes on the controversial law
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In an unprecedented step, Hon’ble Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri. Siddaramaiah has recognised the potential of the handloom sector to create green livelihood opportunities for thousands, and made exemplary provisions in the Karnataka Budget 2023-24 that he presented on 7th July 2023.
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In the past, Karnataka has disastrously placed trust in task forces & vision groups consisting of elite personalities to imagine what is right for Bengaluru. These groups were undemocratic and contrary to the constitutional mandate. The present Congress Government has once again pushed for the formation of another such forum to seek views of the elite in shaping the future of the metropolis.
Please sign this petition to support our appeal to the Deputy Chief Minister of Karnataka demanding that the city be governed through a deeply democratic and inclusive process and that the Metropolitan Planning Committee be constituted immediately.
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Appeal to Karnataka Chief Minister to issue Ordinance to Save Farmers and Dalits impacted by SK Layout from Atrocious Injustice. Please sign this petition within the next 24 hours urging Chief Minister Mr. Bommai to issue the ordinance by the end of the week when his term ends.
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Read the report of a workshop ESG organised to introspect how Bengaluru metropolis’ blue green commons can be reclaimed & transformed into healthy, sylvan, inclusive and accessible spaces.
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ESG invites you to a public workshop on:
“Reclaim and Turn Inclusive Bengaluru and its Blue-Green Commons” on Saturday, 4th February, 2023 at SCM House, 2nd Cross Road, CSI Compound, Mission Road, Sampangi Rama Nagar, Bengaluru, 01:30 pm to 07:00 pm.
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A webinar on Lake Conservation was conducted by ESG on 20th December 2022. This session was mainly organised to benefit activists, researchers, public officials and also concerned citizens to explain how to use judicial orders, government orders and various other laws relating to lakes for the protection, conservation and rehabilitation of tank/lakes, ponds, raja kaluves, and such other water commons.
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In “Seed Activism”, Karine Peschard explores how patenting seeds and turning them into financialised, corporatised and commodified industrial products threatens farm and food securities of the world now and into the future.
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The Supreme Court’s decision restoring ESG’s PIL comes at a time when the world is preparing to address grave biodiversity losses due to trade, biopiracy, over extraction and also due to climate change as part of the 15th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity being held in Montreal 7th to 19th, December, 2022.
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When: 20 December 2022, 4pm to 6pm
This workshop will explain how to:
Legally Protect Lakes and Raja Kaluves from encroachment and pollution.
Build a Lake and Raja Kaluve Protection Committee.
Rehabilitate Lakes and Raja Kaluves in ecologically sensitive and socially inclusive ways.
Where : Via Zoom
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The bedrock of sustainable human futures is in conserving biodiversity and associated traditional knowledge, and ensuring local community’s right to seed sovereignty and seed purity is protected. A variety of corporate and state efforts, however, are systematically accessing these bioresources without priorly informing and seeking permission from communities who have conserved these resources for millenia, and then turning them into corporatised, industrialised, commodified, chemicalised, transgenic and proprietary products.
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The concretising didn’t stop with roads; like a cancer it spread across to pavements, as paved regions into parks, and even into urban forests like Turahalli where, thankfully, public resistance stopped it. But the phenomenon is so widespread now, that it shows up in satellite imageries, and when it rains, the city floods in no time as there is simply no open ground for water to percolate. And in summer ‘heat islands’ result, desiccating what little greenery is left.
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A video by Belmont Forum and International Science Council on ‘Governance of Sociotechnical Transformations” (GoST) project in which ESG is a partner to discover pathways of Transformations to Sustainability.
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A conversation to discuss what caused 2022 Bengaluru Floods, and how this is a recurring phenomenon.
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The city needs granular administrative and planning responses to help identify the poor who are forced to live in flood prone areas out of sheer necessity. They cannot be evicted and thrown to the streets.
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How did the city manage such flooding, being the epicentre of India’s science & technology prowess? Were the software giants located along the city’s Outer Ring Road aware of the risks? Could they have worked on mitigating and managing it better?
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The IT Capital of India which was well on the path of becoming the second Silicon Valley of the world couldn’t wait for carefully and inclusively planned Bengaluru.
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It is the 25th year of Environment Support Group (ESG), as India turns 75! It has been a remarkable journey
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At a time when the United Nations General Assembly has finally passed a resolution making Right to Clean and Healthy Environment a Human Right, Indian Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change is doing everything to destroy India’s progressive environmental jurisprudence.
We invite you to endorse a statement demanding Indian Government must step back from its proposals to comprehensively dilute India’s and devastate India’s environmental laws. And it must stop yielding to corporate pressures and instead defend our Constitutional rights over our health, environment and our futures.
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The 1st webinar as part of the ESG Imaginaries To Make Cities Work was on the theme Waste And Governance and held on 7th July 2022 (5-7 pm). Kirthee Shah, Founder President of INHAF set the tone by explaining the background to the series. The webinar was anchored by Leo F. Saldanha, Coordinator and Trustee of ESG, and Bhargavi S. Rao, Trustee and Senior Fellow at ESG, who also provided an introduction to ESG’s diverse efforts on governance of waste management, and its implications to governance overall. Respondents were Prof. Amita Bhide, Dean, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences; Rizwana Hasan of Bangladesh Environmental Law Alliance; Maitreyi Krishnan of Manthan Law and Shibu Nair of Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.
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The current proposed amendments to four major environmental laws, are effectively a big step away from India’s long held statutory tradition of protecting environmental and natural resources and is a clear indicator of prevailing priority: putting business and commercial interest over environmental protection and safeguarding human rights. The draft Bills were put out on 1st July 2022 by the Ministry in English, not any of the other Scheduled languages, and the commenting period ends on 21st July 2022. Never in the history of India has there ever been such a rush to put interests of international and national business empires over that of peoples of India and its biodiversity.
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For over two decades, ESG has focussed on the emerging urban environmental and socio-economic challenges and has been working with multiple communities, government agencies, academia, media, etc. The approach has always been about finding viable and inclusive solutions to vexatious problems advocating deeply democratic processes that draw on intersectoral, interdisciplinary, intersectional experiences, knowledge and histories. Bangalore and other cities today are in a mess as they follow highly centralised governance approaches that drift from existing legal provisions in which the various local publics find no place to imagine their futures as part of a collective imagining of the city’s future.
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For over two decades, ESG has focussed on emerging urban environmental and socio-economic challenges and worked with multiple communities, government agencies, academia, media, etc. in attending to these issues and conflicts.
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