Environment Support Group

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AdvocacyBiodiversityCampaignsEnvironment & Forest Policy
ESG Author

MoEF&CC must stop destroying India’s progressive environment, forest and biodiversity protection jurisprudence

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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AdvocacyEnvironment & Forest PolicyOther Reports & DocumentsResources
ESG Author

Need for meaningful extensive review and debate on fundamental changes proposed to India’s Environment Protection Act, 1986 and related laws 

India’s environmental jurisprudence has been torn between the competing demands of prioritising environmental protection and securing economic progress.  While there are several judgements that speak to the need for balancing development with environmental priorities, it is not necessarily an exercise that can be easily rationalised.  There is overwhelming evidence in the pollution flowing in every river and lake across the country, in the extensive degradation across the Western Ghats and the Himalayas – resulting in catastrophic impacts on human settlements, in the breakdown of our cities every time it rains or when there is an unrelenting heat wave, and in commons that are extensively encroached, diverted and polluted, that the state of India’s environment is precariously hinged.  The damaging consequences of such extensive degradation are irreversible and will seriously impede the country’s socio-economic progress.

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ESG Imaginaries to Make Cities WorkWebinars
Admin ESG

Week 2 of ESG Imaginaries to Make Cities Work: Challenges of Securing Urban Commons

ESG has worked with this problematique of the commons and demonstrated how securing them can be a win-win for all. Working with communities to resist privatisation of commons, such as lakes, and then asking for a policy to protect them with Public Trust Doctrine and the principle of intergenerational equity  as the basis, has resulted in path breaking outcomes – rehabilitation of lakes as inclusive commons and as sacred spaces that deserve community and statutory protection to advance ecological and water security. 

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Newsletter
John V

EJ Matters Vol 3. Issue 9: Environment Ministry proposes comprehensive dilution of India’s Environmental Laws & More..

There has been systematic dilution of India’s forest and biodiversity protection laws for several years now.   But the Indian Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change now proposes to fundamentally change the essential characteristic of India’s environmental jurisprudence with fundamental changes that it proposes to India’s umbrella environmental law, the Environment Protection Act, 1986, and also the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974, Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981 and Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991. 

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Newsletter
ESG Author

Environment Justice Matters_ Vol3. Issue 8

The Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia University’s Earth Institute issued the  2022 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) report recently.  It is projected as a “data-driven summary of the state of sustainability around the world” and uses “40 performance indicators across 11 issue categories” to rank “180 countries on climate change performance, environmental health, and ecosystem vitality”. India has been ranked at the bottom of this list, scoring merely 18.9 points of a possible 100.

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BengaluruPress Releases
John V

All Saints Church – Sacred Living heritage of Bengaluru – Saved for posterity

At a time when the meeting of minds is so very rare, this effort by the All Saints Church congregation, BMRCL, Government of Karnataka, and various supporters of the cause, including ESG, stands out as representative of the enormous possibilities of democratic engagement. The conciliation mechanism organised by EIB helped in this process. This also helped ensure that the contestations did not end up in Court, burdening further the judiciary, and without a clear outcome in sight.

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Newsletter
ESG Author

Environment Justice Matters Vol 3. Issue. 6 | Large Gaps In Bengaluru’s Urban Planning Process & More

The IPCC sixth assessment report released early April notes that climate misinformation can jeopardise climate action  and weaken public demand for mitigation and adaptation measures. The  report  acknowledges the role of misinformation in fuelling polarisation, saying, “Together with the proliferation of suspicions of “fake news” and “post-truth”, some traditional and social media contents have fuelled polarisation and partisan divides on climate change in many countries.”

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Other Reports & DocumentsPublicationsResearchSolar
ESG Author

THE ANATOMY OF A SOLAR LAND GRAB – Report of a Fact-Finding Committee

Karbi and Adivasi farmers belonging to Mikir Bamuni Grant village in Nagaon district of Assam reported that about 93 acres of the land they were cultivating was taken over forcibly during 2020 by Azure Power Forty Private Limited, a subsidiary of international power corporation Azure Power Global Ltd. The farmers reported that their land was taken for establishing a 15 MW solar power plant by the company. In the process, ripened paddy crop raised on over 200 bighas of land was razed to the ground on 8th October, 2020 by the company. Villagers report that the local police and district authorities backed this forced dislocation of the farmers and forcible takeover of their lands.

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CampaignsEventsPublic ConsultationsSWM PILsUrban GovernanceWaste Management
John V

Comments on SWM Interventions/Policies and for a Consultation on 9th April 2022 in response to directive from Karnataka High Court

Environment Support Group has been involved in initiating resilient and sustainable structural reforms in waste management through field, policy and legal interventions for over two decades now.  Our work, primarily based out of Bangalore metropolitan area (14 million) and Karnataka State, is in coordination with similar efforts nationwide. We work closely with trade unions advancing labour, occupational and health rights of those handling waste, and we also work with vulnerable communities suffering serious contamination due to waste disposal, to ensure their Rights to Health, Clean Environment, Life and Livelihoods is upheld.

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NewsletterPublications
John V

Environment Justice Matters- Vol3. Issue 3 | Sidestepping Climate Change Accord Commitments in support of Mega projects |Amulya K. N. Reddy

A key strategy promoted to tackle climate change, especially from the North, is to keep coal, oil and gas in the ground and shift to renewables.  Which, as Thea Riofrancos argues in Foreign Policy, is fraught with serious inconsistencies even if this involves  shifting the mining of minerals critical to the renewable energy transition to the Global North. ”Global north onshoring does not repair the forms of environmental harm disproportionally meted out in the global south”, he argues. Besides, this would create new problems which primarily affect oppressed populations within affluent countries. 

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NewsletterPublications
John V

Environment Justice Matters Vol. 3 Issue 2 |  Universal Periodic Review of the Human Rights Council 

The Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 appears poised to be the next victim of the continuing onslaught on environmental protections by the Union Government. The Wildlife Protection (Amendment) Bill, 2021 endangers several common but declining species of wildlife by allowing them to be classified as “vermin” and thus be opened up to being hunted. Several species that were previously protected under the Schedules of the Act have been removed in the amendments without any justification.

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Campaigns
ESG Author

Join the 9 ‘K’ Movement – Protect our Commons for Posterity

Excerpt – ESG invites you to join a movement to save and rejuvenate each and every lake, pond, well, every stretch of raja Kaluve, everywhere across Karnataka from encroachment, degradation, pollution and decay. Lakes/tanks are gifts we have received from the past which we must pass on in a better state for the benefit of future generations. If we work collectively, it is possible to make Karnataka a water, food and biodiversity secure region that also builds healthy and sustainable livelihoods.

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NewsletterPublications
John V

Environment Justice Matters Vol. 3 Issue 1 | Prof. M K Prasad | The Mekedatu Project

Leading environmentalist, rationalist, educator and philosopher from Kerala, Prof. M K Prasad, lost his battle with COVID on 17th January 2022.   Prof. Prasad was the inspirational force behind the successful Save Silent Valley Movement, which forced former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to stop the dam that would have destroyed the rainforest

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