Thousands of Adivasi (Indigenous) people across India have rallied against forced evictions in the name of tiger conservation. They held mass protests at several of the country’s most famous tiger reserves.
Tiger reserves: forced evictions
As the Canary previously reported, 2023 marked the 50 year anniversary of Project Tiger. This is a government-funded scheme to establish tiger reserves across the country. It initially covered nine reserves across nine Indian states.
To date, the government has sponsored state authorities to set up 55 of these protected areas across 17 states. State governments have designated these areas to protect tiger populations from significant threats which have caused their numbers to plummet.
Specifically, deforestation, poaching, and human encroachment on habitats have purportedly decimated tiger populations across Asia. In 1900, 100,000 tigers roamed the planet. However, that fell to a global record low of 3,200 in 2010.
But these reserves also represent a legacy of violence and human rights abuses against the Indigenous communities living in them.
According to the World Rainforest Movement, as of 2019, NTCA data showed that state governments have evicted 56,247 families for tiger conservation across India since 1972. These families were from 751 villages across 50 tiger reserves.
Of course, since then, state governments have threatened many more Indigenous communities with eviction. Reports by human rights advocacy and research charity the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) underscore this. The charity produces annual reports on forced evictions in India. According to its latest report, in 2023 and 2022 alone, authorities evicted at least 417 families in two separate tiger reserves.
Hundreds of thousands face eviction for tiger conservation
Throughout 2024, this state-sponsored colonial conservation has only continued apace.
In July, a letter from the director of India’s National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) sparked outrage among Indigenous communities. A Right to Information request revealed that he had written to Chief Wildlife Wardens in 19 states urging them to evict more Adivasis from tiger reserves. Close to 400,000 Adivasis face eviction from tiger reserves across India.
Given this, Indigenous people facing, or already evicted, have mounted a wave of protests. The week commencing 9 September, they gathered at a number of notable tiger reserves. These included Nagarhole, Udanti-Sitanadi, Kaziranga, Rajaji, and Indravati. Many more protests are planned.
Almost 700 Adivasi people from 25 villages protested at the entrance gates of Nagarhole in Karnataka state. It is one of India’s most infamous tiger reserves. There, in 2007, the state government designated the reserve.
However, it imposed this, without seeking consent, on the ancestral land of the Jenu Kuruba. The reserve was also home to other Indigenous communities, such as the Beta Kuruba, Yarava, and Pania tribes.
Leading Adivasi activist JK Thimma said at the protest:
Declaration of tiger reserves on our lands is a violation of the law as our people neither consented to it nor were consulted in the process. Today they have put up signs on our lands declaring them national parks and tiger reserves. NTCA is a trespasser on our lands.
This violation of Indigenous rights must immediately stop and the conservationist cartels (including NGOs like WWF, WCS & WTI) who are involved in doing this must be punished according to the law.
A legacy of ‘deep-seated racism’
The lives of hundreds of thousands of Adivasis in Indian tiger reserves are being destroyed in the name of tiger conservation. The Indian government is illegally evicting them from the land where they have always lived, land which they have always protected.
The big conservation organizations such as WWF and WCS never speak out against the evictions, and claim that “relocations” of tribal people are “voluntary.” But the “relocations” are almost always, in fact, forced evictions.
The Indian authorities seem hellbent on sticking with a totally outdated and discredited colonial model of conservation, one still backed by the likes of WWF and WCS, which views Indigenous peoples as trespassers on their own lands, and brutally evicts them.
There’s a deep-seated racism at work here – the government and conservation organizations view the Adivasis as second-class citizens at best.
These evictions are unlawful according to both national and international law, and don’t work – the forest, the Indigenous people and the tigers can’t survive without one another. Conservation organizations and tour operators are complicit in this scandal – once the people have been cleared out of their ancestral forests, tiger reserve tourism is big business.
Feature and in-text images via Survival International
A revised version (September 2024) of the open-access e-book Food Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order (2022) by Colin Todhunter is now available.
A brand-new concluding chapter, “The Violence of Development”, rounds off a book that presents a scathing critique of the global industrial agriculture system and its proponents. The book takes aim at the Green Revolution and its modern equivalent (genetically modified organisms), the displacement of traditional farming practices, and the devastating impacts of a neoliberal agenda that is conveniently passed off as ‘development’.
By critically examining the concept of ‘development’ and how it has been implemented globally, the new chapter argues that dependency and dispossession remain core elements of the global economic system. Those who are sacrificed on the altar of plunder in the countryside, in the forests or in the hills become regarded as the price worth paying for ‘progress’.
The chapter frames conventional development as based on Western hegemony, imposing certain ideals on the rest of the world and cites post-development theorist Arturo Escobar’s critique of development as a top-down, ethnocentric approach.
The violence of development takes the form of outright brutality and an ideological hegemony: a power play concerned with redefining who we are or what we should be, what is acceptable and what is unacceptable.
As Escobar notes:
Development was and continues to be—in theory and practice—a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of ‘progress’.
By challenging the notion of a unilinear path to development, the chapter argues that historical outcomes were often shaped by chance and conflict rather than following a predetermined course. If history teaches us one thing, it is that humanity has ended up at its current point due to a multitude of struggles and conflicts, the outcomes of which were often in the balance. There is no unilinear path to development and no fixed standard as to what it constitutes.
In other words, we have ended up where we are as much by chance as design. And much of that design was based on colonialism and imperialism. The development of Britain owes much to the $45 trillion that was sucked from India alone, according to economist Utsa Patnaik.
And that situation, in the name of ‘development’, is happening again, as noted by the prominent campaigner Aruna Rodrigues. In discussing the book, she said the following about the chapters on India:
Colin Todhunter at his best: this is graphic, a detailed horror tale in the making for India, an exposé on what is planned, via the farm laws, to hand over Indian sovereignty and food security to big business. There will come a time pretty soon — (not something out there but imminent, unfolding even now), when we will pay the Cargills, Ambanis, Bill Gates, Walmarts — in the absence of national buffer food stocks (an agri policy change to cash crops, the end to small-scale farmers, pushed aside by contract farming and GM crops) — we will pay them to send us food and finance borrowing from international markets to do it.
And this is called ‘development’.
The new conclusion advocates for reestablishing humanity’s connections to the land, drawing inspiration from Gandhi’s philosophy and his concept of a ‘non-interventionist lifestyle’. It frames food justice and food sovereignty as part of a larger struggle against social, economic and environmental injustice and brutality disguised as ‘development’.
Overall, this new concluding chapter provides a comprehensive critique of the global development paradigm, connecting it to the book’s themes of food, dependency and dispossession.
The revised version of Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order can be read for free at Academia.edu (pdf), Heyzine (flipbook) and Global Research.
Mahankali Parvati (left), Moturu Udayam (middle), and Chintala Koteshwaramma (right) perform an anti-war song during World War II with the group they led, Burrakatha Squad. Credit: Praja Natya Mandali Photography Archives
Mallu Swarajyam (1931–2022) was born with an appropriate name. From deep within the mass movement against British colonialism that was initiated by India’s peasants and workers, and then shaped by M.K. Gandhi into the movement for swaraj (self-rule), Bhimireddy Chokkamma drew her baby daughter into the freedom movement with a powerful name that signalled the fight for independence. Born into a house of reading, and able to get books through the radical people’s organisation Andhra Mahasabha, Mallu Swarajyam obtained a Telugu translation of Maxim Gorky’s Mother (1907). The book was one of many titles that were translated in the Soviet Union, part of that country’s great gift to the cause of literacy around the world and circulated by the communists in India. Gorky’s novel revolves around a mother, Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova, and her son, Pavel Vlasov. The mother works in a factory, the brutal father dies, and the son eventually becomes involved in revolutionary activities. The mother worries for her son but soon begins to read the socialist literature that he brings home and also immerses herself in revolutionary activities. This book had a marked impact on Mallu Swarajyam’s life, which she recounted in her 2019 memoir (as told to Katyayini and Vimala), Naa Maate. Tupaki Tuta (‘My Word Are Like Bullets’).
Having read this book at the age of ten, Mallu Swarajyam was inspired the next year to join the call by the Andhra Mahasabha to fight against bonded labour. She decided to break the barriers of caste and to distribute rice to bonded labourers in her town. ‘My own uncles were against my giving rice to bonded labourers’, she recounted. ‘But I was firm that they deserved their share. And my gesture set a precedent in the entire area where bonded labourers started to demand pay for their work’. Her mother supported these efforts, much like Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova supported Pavel Vlasov in Mother. These early experiences prepared Mallu Swarajyam for the rural uprising that would shake the Telugu-speaking region of India between 1946 and 1951 and is known as the Telangana movement.
Mallu Swarajyam, a communist revolutionary hero (left), with other women fighters of the armed struggle in the late 1940s. Credit: Sunil Janah
Mallu Swarajyam’s radicalisation took her into the emergent peasant movement and the attempt to build the communist party. She threw herself into the work of organising the peasantry in her district and soon across the entire region. When the uprising began, she was named as commander of a dalam (a fighting force), her speeches known as fired bullets. The landlords gathered to place a bounty on her head, offering a reward of Rs. 10,000 – a regal sum of money at the time. But she was undaunted, becoming one of the most beloved young leaders of the armed struggle.
Years later, Mallu Swarajyam recounted her experiences in the organisation of the peasants during the 1940s. Women and oppressed-caste Dalits would fill the village air at night with songs of the oppressed as they worked to de-husk rice. The songs were about god and their lives. ‘Under the moonlight’, Swarajyam recalled, the singing was so beautiful that even ‘people who were asleep enjoyed these songs’. These songs were derived from folk art traditions prevalent in Telugu society such as various forms of storytelling that use song and theatre to re-enact performances of Harikatha (the Hindu mythology of Lord Vishnu), Pakir patalu (a trove of Sufi songs), Bhagavatam (stories from the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata), as well as non-religious practices such as Burrakatha and Gollasuddulu, both of which tell stories of workers and peasants with two drums accompanying the singer. It was in these musical forms that the workers and peasants contested the worldview of the dominant castes. And it was in this part of the popular imagination that the Left intervened very early in the struggle for social transformation. When Mallu Swarajyam went to at least thirty villages to start the revolt, she said, ‘I started a revolutionary fire in the people with the song as our vehicle. What more did I need?’.
Left: Gummadi Vithala Rao, popularly known as Gaddar, one of the most influential Telugu-speaking revolutionary songwriters, performs for spectators, first by singing and dancing to a line in his songs and then pausing to explain its political and historical significance. Credit: KN Hari
Right: Telugu poet Srirangam Srinivas Rao, popularly known as Sri Sri, reads a poem from his anthology Maha Prasthanam (Forward March), yellow cover featured on the bottom right, to marchers joining the struggle to fight for another under the red flag (back right). Credit: Kurella Srinivas, 2009
At the heart of our most recent publication – The Telugu People’s Struggle for Land and Dreams (dossier no. 80, September 2024) – is the relationship of culture to peasant and working-class radicalism. In areas of high illiteracy and colonial education systems, it was impossible to transmit a new world view only through the written word or through cultural forms that were alien to the world of the people. Songs and theatre became the forms for political conversation in places such as India, China, and Vietnam. In Vietnam, the Communist Party formed propaganda teams (Doi Tuyen Truyen Vo Trang) that went amongst the people and through plays and songs mobilised the villages to participate in the liberation struggle. In China, the history of taking plays into rural areas goes back to the 1930s; during the Yan’an decade (1935–1945), the Communist cultural troupes began to perform ‘living newspaper’ concerts, a practice developed by the Soviets in the 1920s, in which the actors would improvise plays based on events in the news. Street theatre, songs, wall paintings, magic lantern shows: these became the textbooks of revolutionary activity. Our dossier attempts to highlight the world of songs as a part of the history of socialist culture.
The songs of these revolutionaries, built on peasant ballads and forms, crafted the elements of a new culture: in their words, they rejected the hierarchies of the countryside and in their rhythm, they allowed the peasantry to lift up their voices louder than they often did in the presence of the landlords. Both the content and the form of these songs encapsulated the boldness of a new world.
Praja Natya Mandali performs a street play. Credit: Praja Natya Mandali Photography Archives
The histories of these cultural actions and the transformations they engendered are often forgotten – the suppression of these histories plays a political role in our time. It was clear that the communist artists of the 1940s closely studied the earlier peasant songs and the history of rebellion embedded in them; they then took that history and developed it further, frequently using new, vibrant rhythms to recount the revolutionary history of the peasants and workers. Songs of the history of resistance build on the past to create their own, new histories. This is the dialectical spiral of culture, a lifting up of memories of past struggles to inspire new struggles, whose memory in turn stimulates newer struggles; each set of struggles pushing the cultural forms to the edge of their own possibility, building new confidence in the people whose sense of themselves has been diminished by old hierarchies and by old poverty.
Our dossier hopes to bring part of that history to light, which is indeed very much along the grain of the work of our art department (for more of this kind of archival and theoretical work, I recommend that you subscribe to the Tricontinental Art Bulletin, initiated in March and published on the last Sunday of each month).
This collage includes photographs of the street play Veera Telangana (Heroic Telangana) taken in the 2000s by Praja Natya Mandali and photographs of a troop (dalam) of the armed struggle marching in the late 1940s taken by Sunil Janah.
Khalida Jarrar (born 1963) is a Palestinian leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. A brave and kind person, Jarrar has been in the crosshairs of the Israeli military occupation forces for decades. She has been frequently arrested and held in administrative detention, often with no charge (the first time was in 1989 when she was arrested at an International Women’s Day march in Palestine). Since 2015, she has spent as much time in prison as she has outside of it, with increasingly longer terms behind bars. In prison, Jarrar became an important voice for women prisoners and organised political schools for her fellow inmates. In 2020, from Israel’s Damon prison, Khalida Jarrar smuggled out a letter which was delivered as a speech by her daughters at the Palestine Writes Literature Festival; it speaks about the importance of cultural work amongst the inmates:
Books constitute the foundation of life in prison. They preserve the psychological and moral balance of the freedom fighters who view their detentions as part of the overall resistance against the colonial occupation of Palestine. Books also play a role in each prisoner’s individual struggle of Will between them and the prisons’ authorities. In other words, the struggle becomes a challenge for Palestinian prisoners as the jailors seek to strip us from our humanity and keep us isolated from the outside world. The challenge for prisoners is to transform our detention into a state of a ‘cultural revolution’ through reading, education and literary discussions.
When I read Jarrar’s speech, I was struck by one sentence. She wrote: ‘Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother became a comfort to women prisoners who are deprived of their mothers’ love’. That Jarrar and other Palestinian woman prisoners would experience in 2020 the same sort of sentiments that Mallu Swarajyam experienced in the 1940s with the reading of Mother is extraordinary. It reminds us of the power of certain kinds of fiction to lift the spirits and inspire us to act in ways that we could otherwise not easily imagine.
On 11 July 2021, during one of Jarrar’s periods of confinement in Israel’s prisons, her daughter Suha died. The Israelis rejected Jarrar’s application to attend Suha’s funeral. Grief-stricken, Jarrar wrote a poem to mourn her child,
Suha, my precious.
They have stripped me from giving you a final kiss.
I send you a flower as a goodbye.
Your absence pains me, sears me.
The pain is excruciating.
I remain steadfast and strong,
Like the mountains of beloved Palestine.
Poems, songs, novels, plays: fiction that in the dialectical spiral inspires us to act and then to depict our actions, which in turn inspires others to act and then to write their stories.
Since October 2023, the Israelis have hardened their treatment of Palestinian prisoners, and brought in thousands of new Palestinian political prisoners into already overcrowded prisons. The conditions are now deadly. Khalida Jarrar’s most recent words from prison, published on 28 August, are heartbreaking. During a visit from lawyers of the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Society Prisoners’ Club, she sent the following message:
I am dying every day. The cell resembles a closed small can. There is a toilet in the cell and a small window above, which was closed after one day. They left us no way to breathe. There is a narrow vent that I sat next to most of the time to breathe. I am really suffocating in my cell, waiting time to pass, hoping to find oxygen to breathe and stay alive. The high temperature increased the tragic condition of my isolation, as I feel myself existing in an oven. I can’t sleep due to the high temperature, and they intended to cut off the water in the cell, and when I asked to refill my bottle of water, they bring it after four hours at least. They let me out to the prison’s courtyard only once after eight days of isolation.
We stand in full solidarity with Khalida Jarrar. We will translate our latest dossier into Arabic and send it to her so that she can read the songs of the Telangana heroes and take inspiration from them.
Invention is the mother of necessity, and Russia’s response to largely Western-imposed economic and trade sanctions has shown the extent of that inventiveness. While enduring attritive punishment in its Ukraine campaign, the war remains sustainable for the Kremlin. The domestic economy has not collapsed, despite apocalyptic predictions to the contrary. In terms of exports, Russia is carving out new trade routes, a move that has been welcomed by notable powers in the Global South.
One of the chief prosecutors of sanctions against Moscow was initially confident about the damage that would be caused by economic bludgeoning. US President Joe Biden, in February 2022, insisted on the imposition of measures that would “impair [Russia’s] ability to compete in a high-tech 21st century economy.” The Council of the European Union also explained that the move was intended to weaken Moscow’s “ability to finance the war and specifically target the political, military and economic elite responsible for the invasion [of Ukraine].”
In all this, the European Union, the United States and other governments have ignored a salient historical lesson when resorting to supposedly punitive formulae intended to either deter Russia from pursuing a course of action or depriving it of necessary resources. States subject to supposedly crushing economic measures can adapt, showing streaks of impressive resilience. The response from Japan, Germany and Italy during the 1930s in the face of sanctions imposed by the League of Nations provide irrefutable proof of that proposition. All, to a certain extent, pursued what came to be known as Blockadefestigkeit, or blockade resilience. With bitter irony, the targeted powers also felt emboldened to pursue even more aggressive measures to subvert the restraints placed upon them.
By the end of 2022, Russia had become China’s second biggest supplier of Russian crude oil. India has also been particularly hungry for Russian oil. Producing only 10% of domestic supply, Russia contributed 34% of the rest of Indian oil consumption in 2023.
Trade routes are also being pursued with greater vigour than ever. This year, progress was made between Russia and China on a North Sea Route, which straddles the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, running from Murmansk on the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait and the Far East. The agreement between Russia’s state nuclear agency Rosatom and China’s Hainan Yangpu Newnew Shipping Co Ltd envisages the joint design and creation of Arctic-class container vessels to cope with the punishing conditions throughout the year. Rosatom’s special representative for Arctic development, Vladimir Panov, confidently declared that up to 3 million tonnes of transit cargo would flow along the NSR in 2024.
While that agreement will operate to Russia’s frozen north, another transport route has also received a boosting tonic. Of late, Moscow and New Delhi have been making progress on the 7,200-kilometre International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which will run from St. Petersburg in northwestern Russia to ports in southern Iran for onward movement to Mumbai. While the agreement between Russia, Iran and India for such a multimodal corridor dates back to September 2000, the advent of sanctions imposed in the aftermath of the Ukraine War propelled Moscow to seek succour in the export markets of the Middle East and Asia.
As staff writers at Nikkeipoint out, the shipping route will not only bypass Europe but be “less than half as long as the current standard path through the Mediterranean Sea and the Suez Canal.” One calculation suggests that the time needed to transport cargo to Moscow from Mumbai prior to the initiation of the corridor was between 40 and 60 days. As things stand, the transit time has been shaved to 25-30 days, with transportation costs falling by 30%.
Much progress has been made on the western route, which involves the use of Azerbaijan’s rail and road facilities. In March, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Digital Development and Transport revealed that rail freight grew by approximately 30% in 2023. Road freight rose to 1.3 million tonnes, an increase of 35%. The ministry anticipates the amount of tonnage in terms of freight traffic to rise to 30 million per year. In June this year, the Rasht-Caspian Sea link connecting the Persian Gulf with the Caspian Sea via rail was opened in the presence of Russian, Iranian and Azerbaijani dignitaries.
A further factor that adds worth to the corridor is the increasingly fraught nature of freight traffic from Europe to Asia via the Suez Canal. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have been harrying vessels in the Red Sea, a response to Israel’s ferocious campaign in Gaza. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk suggested back in January that the “North-South [corridor] will gain global significance” given the crisis in the Red Sea.
Despite the frightful losses being endured in the Russia-Ukraine war, it is clear, at least when it comes to using economic and financial weapons, that Moscow has prevailed. It has outfoxed its opponents, and, along the way, sought to redraw global trade routes that will furnish it with even greater armour from future economic shocks. Other countries less keen to seek a moral stake in the Ukraine conflict than pursue their own trade interests, have been most enthusiastic.
Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and SAFHAL Helicopter Engines Pvt. Ltd. (SAFHAL) have signed an airframer contract, to commence joint design, development, manufacture, supply, and support of a new generation high power engine named Aravalli for the 13-ton Medium Lift class, Indian Multi-Role Helicopter (IMRH) and the Deck-Based Multi-Role Helicopter (DBMRH), being designed & developed by […]
A 40-second video is viral across social media platforms with the claim that it shows Muslim children purposefully sabotaging train tracks in a bid to cause railway accidents in India. Some users on X have tagged this as an instance of ‘Rail Jihad.’ In the video, three children, dressed in kurtas, appear to be tampering with the railway tracks. One of them can be seen loosening the bolts of a fish plate with a large spanner, while another child can be seen collecting the bolts in a sack.
@SureshChavhanke, the editor-in-chief of propaganda outlet Sudarshan News, tweeted the video and urged the Railway Minister to give orders to RPF to shoot people indulging in such acts. (Archive)
इस उम्र में ये रेल की पटरियां उखाड़ रहे हैं। सोचिए, अगले 50 वर्षों में ये क्या करेंगे?
डॉ. बाबासाहेब अंबेडकर जी ने इनके बारे में क्या कहा था, उसे सत्ता को पढ़ना और समझना चाहिए। केवल उनके नाम जाप से कुछ नहीं होगा। @AshwiniVaishnaw जी, ऐसी हरकतें दिखते ही गोली मारने का आदेश… pic.twitter.com/Y2UXzkYBBI
— Dr. Suresh Chavhanke “Sudarshan News” (@SureshChavhanke) August 30, 2024
X-verified user @XSecular_ posted the video, using expletives to refer to Muslim children, and urging the railway minister to take action against Muslim slum dwellers near railway tracks. At the time of this article being written, the post has managed to accumulate more than 6 Lakh views and has been re-shared more than 9,500 times. (Archive)
वीडियो पता नही कहा की है पर आप कपड़ो से पहचान सकते हो सूर के पिल्लों को @RailMinIndia@AshwiniVaishnaw
महोदय जितने भी रेलवे पटरी के आस पास मुस्लिम झुग्गी झोपड़ी में पड़े है उन्हें हटाओ नही तो किसी दिन ये जिहादी बहुत बड़ा कांड कर देंगे pic.twitter.com/nvoZGrf0UP
X-verified user @TheSquind, with its long history of peddling disinformation and Islamophobic content on social media, tweeted the video, alluding to the Muslim children as being instrumental in railway accidents. (Archive)
We ran a reverse image search on one of the key frames from the viral video, and came across a Facebook video uploaded by a profile named ‘Pakistani Trains‘ on December 5, 2023. Therefore, it is evident that the Facebook video is at least eight-month old. Further, the caption of the video, when translated from Urdu to English, reads: “Near Sartaj Khan Phatak, Boat Basin Chowki, the valuable goods of railway line are being stolen a lot. P.S. Boat Basin is requested to take this action.” Further, the bio of the profile attributes its administration to a certain Fahad Asif, whose YouTube channel is also linked in the page. On examining the channel, we found several videos on Pakistani railways.
سر تاج خان پہاٹک بوٹ بیسن چوکی کی پاس ریلوے لائن کا قیمتی سامان کافی دینو سے چوری ہورہا ہے پی ایس بوٹ بیسن سے درخواست ہے کہ اس ایکشن لیا جائے
Taking a cue from the translated caption of the video linked above, we ran another relevant keyword search on Facebook, and came across this Facebook post by the Media Cell – DIG South Zone, from December 5, 2023. The caption, which is in Urdu, reports on a case of theft of track nut bolts from the Sartaj Khan Phatak railway line, near Boat Basin Chowki. In the latter part of the video, starting from the 29-second mark, three children are interrogated as to their participation in the theft. On account of all three of them being juveniles, one of the children’s father also appears in the video and takes accountability of the theft in which his son had participated. They can be seen admitting that they had stolen bolts and screws from between train tracks from a location they disclose as ‘Shireen Jinnah’.
بوٹ بیسن چوکی کے قریب سرتاج خان پھاٹک ریلوے لائن سے پٹری کے نٹ بولٹ چوری کی ویڈیو کا معاملہ۔
ڈی آئی جی ساؤتھ کی ہدایت پر ایس ایچ او بوٹ بیسن نے کاروائی کرتے ہوۓ ریلوے پھاٹک سے سامان چوری کرنے والے نو عمر بچوں کو تھانے لایا گیا۔
بچے چونکہ چھوٹے ہیں اس بنا پر بچوں کے والدین کو تھانے بلایا گیا۔
جنہیں بچوں کی چوری سے متعلق آگاہ کرتے ہوۓ تنبیہ کی گئی کے اپنے بچوں کا دھیان رکھیں اور انکی روز مرہ کی غیر معمولی سرگرمیوں پر کڑی نظر رکھیں۔
والدین کی طرف سے یقین دھانی کرائے جانے پر بچوں کو والدین کے حوالے کردیا گیا ۔
Further, we came across another YouTube video which presents a concise report on the theft. The voice-over narration adds that the three children had been taken into police custody by the Boat Basin police, where they were questioned by the officer in-charge, named in the video as ‘Shahzad’.
To sum up, the video which is viral with the claim that Muslim children are purposefully sabotaging railway tracks in order to cause accidents in India is actually a clip from December 2023. On investigating, Alt News found that this video is from Karachi, Pakistan, and depicts three children stealing nuts and bolts from railway tracks.
On 8 August 2024, a 31-year-old doctor at the RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata (West Bengal, India) finished her 36-hour shift at the hospital, ate dinner with her colleagues, and went to the college’s seminar hall to rest before her next shift. The next day, shortly after being reported missing, she was found in a seminar room, her lifeless body displaying all the signs of terrible violence. Since Indian law forbids revealing the names of victims of sexual crimes, her name will not appear in this newsletter.
This young doctor’s story is by no means an isolated incident: every fifteen minutes, a woman in India reports a rape. In 2022, at least 31,000 rapes were reported, a 12% increase from 2020. These statistics vastly underrepresent the extent of sexual crimes, many of which go unreported for fear of social sanction and patriarchal disbelief. In 2018, the World Health Organisation (WHO) published an extensive study of violence against women using data from 161 countries between 2000 and 2018, which showed that nearly one in three, or 30%, of women ‘have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner or non-partner or both’. What this young doctor faced was an extreme version of an outrageously commonplace occurrence.
Nalini Malini (India), Listening to the Shades, 2007.
Not long after her body was discovered, RG Kar College Principal Dr Sandip Ghosh revealed the victim’s name and blamed her for what had happened. The hospital authorities informed the young doctor’s parents that she had committed suicide. They waited hours for the authorities to allow a post-mortem, which was done in haste. ‘She was my only daughter’, her mother said. ‘I worked hard for her to become a doctor. And now she is gone’. The police surrounded the family home and would not allow anyone to meet them, and the government pressured the family to cremate her body quickly and organised the entire cremation process. They wanted the truth to vanish. It was only because activists of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) blocked the ambulance that the family was able to see the body.
On 10 August, the day after the young doctor’s body was discovered, the DYFI, Students Federation of India (SFI), Communist Party of India (Marxist), and other organisations held protests across West Bengal to ensure justice. These protests grew rapidly, with medical personnel across the state, and then across India, standing outside their workplaces with placards expressing their political anger. The women’s movement, which saw massive protests in 2012 after a young woman in Delhi was gang raped and murdered, again took to the streets. The number of young women who attended these protests reflects the scale of sexual violence in Indian society, and their speeches and posters were saturated with sadness and anger. ‘Reclaim the night’, tens of thousands of women shouted in protests across West Bengal on 14 August, India’s independence day.
Rani Chanda (India), The Solace, 1932
The most remarkable aspect of this protest movement was the mobilisation of medical unions and doctors. On 12 August, the Federation of Resident Doctors Association (FORDA), with whom the murdered doctor was affiliated, called upon all doctors to suspend non-emergency medical services. The next day, doctors in government hospitals across India put on their white coats and complied. The head of the Indian Medical Association, Dr RV Asokan, met with Union Health Minister JP Nadda to present five demands:
hospitals must be safe zones;
the central government must pass a law protecting health workers;
the family must be given adequate compensation;
the government must conduct a time-bound investigation; and
resident doctors must have decent working conditions (and not have to work a 36-hour shift).
The WHO reports that up to 38% of health workers suffer physical violence during their careers, but in India the numbers are astronomically higher. For instance, nearly 75% of Indian doctors report experiencing some form of violence while more than 80% say that they are over-stressed and 56% do not get enough sleep. Most of these doctors are attacked by patients’ families who believe their relatives have not received adequate healthcare. Testimonies of female doctors during the protests indicate that women health workers routinely experience sexual harassment and violence not only from patients, but from other hospital employees. The dangerous culture in these institutions, many of them say, is unbearable, as is evidenced by the high suicide rates among nurses that are committed in response to sexual and other forms of harassment – a serious problem that received little attention. An online search using the keywords ‘nurses’, ‘India’, ‘sexual harassment’, and ‘suicide’ brings up a stunning number of reports from just the past year. This explains why doctors and nurses have reacted with such vehemence to the death of the young doctor at RG Kar.
Dipali Bhattacharya (India), Untitled, 2007.
On 13 August, the Calcutta High Court ordered the police to hand over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation. On the night of 14 August, vandals destroyed a great deal of campus property, attacked doctors who were holding a midnight vigil, threw stones at nearby police, and destroyed evidence that remained on the scene, including the seminar room where the doctor was found, suggesting an attempt to disrupt any investigation. In response to the attack, FORDA resumed its strike.
Rather than arrest anyone on the scene, the authorities accused leaders of the peaceful protests of being the culprits, including the DYFI and SFI leaders who had initiated the first protests. DYFI Secretary for West Bengal Minakshi Mukherjee was one of those summoned by the police. ‘The people who are connected to the vandalism of a hospital’, she said, ‘cannot be from civil society. Who, then, is protecting these people?’
The police also summoned two doctors, Dr Subarna Goswami and Dr Kunal Sarkar, to the police station on the charge of spreading misinformation about the post-mortem report. In fact, the two are vocal critics of the state government, and the community of doctors saw the summons as an act of intimidation and marched with them to the police station.
There is widespread discontent about the West Bengal state government led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee of the All India Trinamool Congress, a centre-right party formed in 1998 that has been in power since 2011. A particularly salient example of the source of this lack of confidence in the state government is its decision to hastily rehire Dr Ghosh after his resignation from RG Kar to be the principal of the National Medical College in Kolkata. The Calcutta High Court rebuked the government for this decision and demanded that Dr Ghosh be placed on extended leave while the investigation continued.
Dr Ghosh not only grossly mishandled the murder case of this young doctor: he is also accused of fraud. Accusations that the murdered doctor was going to release more evidence of Dr Ghosh’s corruption at the college are now spreading across the country alongside allegations that sexual violence and murder were being wielded to silence someone who had evidence of another crime. Whether the government will investigate these accusations is unlikely given the wide latitude afforded to powerful people.
Sunayani Devi (India), Lady with Parrot, 1920s.
The West Bengal government is defined by its fear of the people. On 18 August, the state’s two iconic football teams, East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, were set to play for the Durand Cup. When it became clear that fans intended to protest from the stands, the government cancelled the match. This did not stop the teams’ fans from joining with fans of the third-most important West Bengal football team, Mohammedan Sporting, to mobilise outside the Yuva Bharati Stadium to protest the match cancellation and the young doctor’s murder. ‘We want justice for RG Kar’, they said. In response, they were attacked by the police.
Shipra Bhattacharya (India), Desire, 2006.
Many years ago, the poet Subho Dasgupta wrote the beloved and powerful poem Ami sei meye (I Am That Girl), which could very well be the soundtrack of these struggles:
I am that girl.
The one you see every day on the bus, train, street
whose sari, tip of forehead, earrings, and ankles
you see everyday
and
dream of seeing more.
You see me in your dreams, as you wished.
I am that girl.
…
I am that girl – from the shanty Kamin Basti in Chai Bagan, Assam
who you want to abduct to the Sahibi Bungalow at midnight,
want to see her naked body with your eyes intoxicated with the burning light of the fireplace.
I am that girl.
…
In hard times, the family relies on me.
Mother’s medicine is bought with my tuition earnings.
My extra income bought my brother’s books.
My whole body was drenched in heavy rain
with the black sky on his head.
I am an umbrella.
The family lives happily under my protection.
…
Like a destructive wildfire
I will continue to move forward! And on either side of my way forward
numerous headless bodies
will continue to suffer from
terrible pain:
the body of civilisation
body of progress
body of improvement.
The body of society.
Maybe I’m the girl! Maybe! Maybe…
The paintings in this newsletter are all done by women who were born in Bengal.
India’s new BioE3 policy puts alternative proteins and future food in sharp focus – what does the biomanufacturing strategy mean for this sector?
On Saturday, India announced a biotechnology policy focused on the economy and climate, with smart proteins and functional foods – as well as climate-resilient agriculture – among six pillars of the strategy.
With BioE3 (which stands for Biotechnology for Economy, Employment, and Environment) being approved by the Union Cabinet, India is aiming to foster “high-performance biomanufacturing”, with a focus on accelerating tech development and commercialisation by getting up biomanufacturing hubs and biofoundries.
The policy is designed to strengthen the country’s net-zero goal of 2070 and its Lifestyle for Environment strategy (which encourages green behaviours), and speed up ‘green growth’ by promoting a circular bioeconomy. The government aims to position India as “a potential leader in the fourth industrial revolution”, science and tech minister Jitendra Yadav said in a press conference yesterday.
The administration defined “high-performance biomanufacturing” as the ability to produce products from medicine to materials, promote advanced biotech processes for the manufacturing sector, as well as address farming and food challenges.
The six focus areas are high-value bio-based chemicals, biopolymers and enzymes; smart proteins and functional foods; precision biotherapeutics; climate-resilient agriculture; carbon capture; and marine and space research.
That alternative proteins have been highlighted as an economic pillar of the world’s most populous nation is a big deal for the industry. Here’s how it happened, and what comes next.
How alternative proteins became part of India’s BioE3 policy
It all started in July 2023, when the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology, and Innovation Advisory Council met to identify key areas of scientific importance for high-performance biomanufacturing, explains Sneha Singh, acting managing director of the Good Food Institute (GFI) India.
The secretary of the Department of Biotechnology, Dr Rajesh Gokhale, presented smart proteins as part of the initiative. Since then, the department has been holding closed-door meetings with an expert committee to identify a strategic roadmap and period goals for the alternative protein industry.
Courtesy: Blue Tribe Foods
GFI India – a think tank focused on alternative proteins, which include plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation-derived proteins – was part of these meetings. “The inclusion of smart protein as part of the BioE3 policy is the government’s signal to the world that India is looking to be the hub for R&D and cost-efficient manufacturing in this emerging sector,” Singh tells Green Queen.
She adds that other agencies have been engaging on smart proteins too. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has been working on regulatory clarity, while the Ministry of Food Processing Industries (MoFPI) showcased plant protein technology at the World Food India event.
The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council has also backed entrepreneurs through early-stage ignition grants, and the Department of Science and Technology has led calls to promote translational R&D.
How will smart protein startups profit from BioE3?
The biomanufacturing policy “acts as a catalyst” for alternative protein’s growth in key foundational areas, according to Singh.
“By providing dedicated R&D and innovation support, the policy will accelerate the development of new technologies and processes that can pave the way towards the nutrition, price, and taste parity of smart protein products, making them a truly competitive alternative to their animal-derived counterparts,” she explains.
Meanwhile, the establishment of manufacturing hubs and biofoundries will offer “crucial support” for large-scale commercialisation. “This increased production capacity can significantly improve the accessibility and affordability of smart protein products, enabling them to reach a wider consumer base,” she says.
Courtesy: Perfect Day/Zydus Lifesciences
“Smart protein startups will gain significant momentum through dedicated R&D and innovation support, greater investments, and a nurturing ecosystem,” she adds. “The policy will foster a collaborative environment, facilitating the exchange of knowledge and resources between industry and academia, and encouraging public and private partnerships, leading to faster development and commercialisation of smart protein technologies with biohubs and biofoundries.”
Agriculture accounts for 15% of India’s emissions, and two-thirds of this comes from livestock farming. Singh believes the circular bioeconomy focus resonates with the goals of food sustainability: “By reducing reliance on animal farming, alternative proteins address environmental concerns, further strengthening the smart protein sector’s appeal.”
Who else stands to benefit?
But it’s not just companies that benefit from India’s new policy. “With the growing demand for millets, chickpeas, and other indigenous crops for smart protein end-products, farmers and crop-producing communities can explore new avenues with these resource-efficient crops to create a robust supply chain and contribute to rural economic development,” outlines Singh.
“The policy’s commitment to expanding the skilled workforce is another vital aspect, as it aligns perfectly with the sector’s rapid growth and immense economic potential,” she adds. This will “open several doors for students and the nascent workforce”, who’d be able to enter a fast-growing industry through dedicated coursework and multidisciplinary roles.
This is something Gokhale touched upon in the press conference too. “[BioE3] is expected to generate substantial employment opportunities, particularly in tier-II and tier-III cities, where biomanufacturing hubs will be set up,” he said. “These hubs will leverage local biomass sources, thereby enhancing economic development in these regions.”
Looking at things longer-term, all these efforts will combine to bring benefits to consumers. They will “gain access to a wider array of better-quality, tastier, and more nutritious smart protein products, catering to their diverse preferences”, notes Singh.
Courtesy: GFI India
At around 20%, India has the largest vegetarian population in the world. A report by GFI India last year found that one in four early-adopter consumers would consider giving up conventional meat, seafood, dairy or eggs in the future, with issues like hygiene, ease of cooking, animal welfare, and planetary impact top of mind.
Meanwhile, a perceived ‘unnaturalness’, lack of clarity on health benefits, and taste and price are among the major consumption barriers for alternative proteins in India. People over 45 feel these products are not relevant to them and possess a synthetic taste, while product availability is a key hurdle for many Indians. The amped-up focus on biomanufacturing would help address many of these challenges.
Looking to the future
India’s bioeconomy has grown immensely in the last decade, going from $10B in 2014 to more than $130B in 2024, according to figures cited by Gokhale. This trajectory is set to continue, with forecasts valuing the sector at $300B by 2030.
“Notably, the once fledgling pharmaceutical industry is now a $50B behemoth, fulfilling a significant portion of global demand for medicines and vaccines,” says Singh. “Today, a similar opportunity awaits in the smart protein sector. India’s robust biopharmaceutical and bioprocessing industries have already laid a strong foundation, establishing us as a key player in R&D, innovation, and the large-scale manufacturing capabilities needed for the smart protein sector globally.”
Courtesy: Seaspire
Singh references the government’s Make in India initiative, the propulsion of entrepreneurial ventures, skilled talent generation, and technological advancements as markers of India’s potential to become a global manufacturing hub for smart proteins.
“Leveraging its biomanufacturing capabilities, India can innovate and scale up production of crucial equipment and ingredients cost-competitively, leading the way for technological breakthroughs to produce high-quality and low-cost food manufacturing while fostering robust bioeconomy growth,” she says.
Just earlier this month, the central government introduced 109 new climate-resilient crop varieties for the country’s farmers – for Singh, this is a sign India is “fully committed to making our food systems more productive while also being more cognisant of the impacts of climate change”.
This effort also shares synergies with alternative proteins. “Many of these climate-positive crops, such as pulses, legumes, and beans, have applications for plant-based proteins,” she says. “Beyond climate resilience, government support for research on crop breeds with higher protein content and reduced off-flavours can be hugely impactful in increasing the commercial potential of these crops through plant protein value chains.”
Courtesy: Narendra Modi/X
India has also launched a joint climate-smart agritech accelerator programme with Australia. And last week, Mumbai-based Zydus Biosciences agreed to buy a 50% stake in biomanufacturer Sterling Biotech from Californian precision fermentation pioneer Perfect Day – they plan to open an animal-free protein factory to supply to global markets.
“Climate-resilient agriculture is not solely about safeguarding food systems from the effects of climate change – it is also about reducing their contribution to this global challenge,” says Singh.
“We always start with a question — that’s where everything begins,” says Himalini Varma, the director of AJWS grantee Thoughtshop Foundation. Her organization, co-led with her partner Santayan Sangupta in 1993, has transformed the lives of thousands of young women across West Bengal, India, by approaching change through this lens: opening up space to …
India’s Zydus Lifesciences has agreed to take a 50% stake fermented protein manufacturer Sterling Biotech from Perfect Day, with an animal-free dairy facility in the works.
Californian precision fermentation startup Perfect Day has agreed to sell 50% of its stake in Mumbai-based Sterling Biotech – a leading manufacturer of pharmaceutical gelatin and fermentation-derived ingredients – to Zydus Lifesciences for ₹550 crore ($66M), with the business now becoming a joint venture.
The move will give both companies equal representation on the board, and shift Sterling Biotech’s focus towards animal-free protein production, according to local media. Perfect Day and Zydus are now planning a dedicated precision fermentation facility to supply to global markets.
It comes two years after Perfect Day – which makes precision-fermented whey protein for use in animal-free dairy – bought Sterling Biotech from bankruptcy in a $78M deal. Zydus’s purchase comes at a 70% premium, on the back of record revenues for the manufacturer in 2023.
The joint venture “sends a strong signal to the broader biopharma sector”, according to Aiyanna Belliappa, senior innovation and entrepreneurship specialist at the Good Food Institute (GFI) India, who called Zydus’s strategic partnership with Perfect Day “extremely encouraging”.
“Aligning with the Indian government’s forward-thinking BioE3 policy, this development further solidifies India’s position as a global leader in biomanufacturing for healthcare, food, and nutrition,” he told Green Queen.
Perfect Day, Zydus look to tap India’s manufacturing prowess
Courtesy: Perfect Day
Sterling Biotech, one of the world’s largest pharma gelatin producers, was admitted into insolvency in 2018, and went into liquidation a year later. After an auction process, Perfect Day emerged as the winning bidder, signalling its interest in India’s precision fermentation sector and manufacturing capabilities.
It gave Perfect Day access to two facilities in Gujarat and another in Tamil Nadu (which seems to have closed now). The new state-of-the-art factory as part of the joint venture will allow Sterling Biotech to speed up production of planet-friendly proteins and cater to the growing consumer demand for fermentation-based products and ethical nutrition, the announcement said.
The transaction marks Zydus’s entry into specialised biotech products for health and nutrition, meeting demand from consumers who “prefer animal-free protein or suffer from lactose intolerance”.
Nutrition and health are among the top purchase drivers for alternative proteins in India. The demand for animal-free proteins can be gauged from consumer sentiments on plant-based dairy: a 2023 report by GFI India revealed that 43% of Indians would try plant-based dairy products for their health benefits (second only to the importance of protein content).
The new structure of Sterling Biotech will enable Perfect Day to “significantly enhance” its tech capabilities in India as part of an emerging market growth strategy, while Zydus will continue to leverage its manufacturing and commercial expertise.
“We are dedicated to promoting growth through partnerships and are consistently exploring new collaborations to position India as a premier global supply chain hub,” said Zydus managing director Sharvil Patel. “We are excited to join forces with Perfect Day and create a win-win combination that leverages both our strengths and expertise to create value for the consumers.”
Highlighting India’s manufacturing prowess, Michal Klar, investor and funding partner at Better Bite Ventures, told GFI India in its report last year that the country is “uniquely positioned” to be an alternative protein innovation and manufacturing hub thanks to world-class talent and cost-efficient scale-up opportunities.
“This is especially relevant for technologies like precision fermentation that can benefit from talent and equipment currently used for biomedical research and production,” Klar added.
A rollercoaster year for Perfect Day
Courtesy: Perfect Day
Whether the move accelerates Perfect Day’s interest in the Indian market remains to be seen – the startup already obtained premarket approval for its animal-free whey protein from the Food Safety Standards and Authority of India, following its purchase of Sterling Biotech.
“This partnership allows Perfect Day to significantly boost its capabilities to meet the demands of the fast-growing global market. We deeply value our collaboration with Zydus and believe this joint venture will allow both parties to benefit from each other’s expertise,” said TM Narayan, interim CEO of Perfect Day.
The premium valuation of its initial takeover – Perfect Day bought Sterling Biotech for $78M in 2022 ($83M after adjusting for inflation), and has sold half of it for $66M – represents a win in a topsy-turvy year for the Californian alternative protein player.
In July 2023, it laid off 15% of its workforce (134 employees) as it shifted focus to B2B and its tech-led offshoot Nth Bio. In line with that, it sold its D2C subsidiary The Urgent Company – which comprised Coolhaus, Brave Robot, Modern Kitchen and California Performance Co. – to food tech company Superlatus in September on a promissory note of $3.15M, according to SEC filings.
Then in January, it raised $90M in a Series E round – taking total funding to $840M since its inception in 2014 – but this coincided with the exit of founders Ryan Pandya and Peramul Gandhi (with Narayan taking over). And it was the subject of a $134M lawsuit in April by manufacturing partner Olon, which accused Perfect Day of a breach of contract. The dispute is ongoing.
Meanwhile, Perfect Day’s whey protein appeared in Unilever’s lactose-free chocolate ice cream under the Breyers brand; Strive Nutrition announced it’s developing products with Perfect Day and TurtleTree’s whey proteins; and Bored Cow – Tomorrow Farms’ animal-free milk range that uses Perfect Day’s protein – rolled out into Target stores across the US.
Nestlé also released a limited-edition animal-free whey protein powder under its Orgain brand, called Better Whey. While one Perfect Day employee seemed to confirm that Nestlé was using its whey, a spokesperson for the startup declined to confirm this on the record.
The premium valuation of Sterling Biotech worried analysts, however, with Zydus’ share price plummeting by 5.9% when the stock market opened on Monday. According to brokerage firm Nomura, Sterling Biotech recorded ₹450 crore ($53.6M) in revenue in 2023, with annual sales up by 10% since 2021.
Perfect Day did not respond to a request for comment.
Noam Chomsky (95) famous dissident and father of modern linguistics, considered one of the world’s leading intellectuals, is recovering from a stroke he suffered at age 94 and now living with his wife in Brazil. According to a report in Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now d/d July 2, 2024, this past June Brazilian President Lula personally visited Chomsky, holding his hand, saying: “You are one of the most influential people of my life” personally witnessed by Vijay Prashad, co-author with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal (The New Press).
Indeed, Noam Chomsky is established as one of the most influential intellectuals of the 21st century.
A pre-stroke video interview with Chomsky conducted at the University of Arizona is extraordinarily contemporary and insightful with a powerful message: What Does the Future Hold Q&A With Noam Chomsky hosted by Lori Poloni-Staudinger, Dean of School of Behavioral Sciences and Professor, School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona.
Chomsky joined the School of Behavioral Sciences in 2017 and taught “Consequences of Capitalism.”
This article is a synopsis of some of Chomsky’s responses to questions, and it includes third-party supporting facts surrounding his statements about the two biggest risks to humanity’s continual existence.
What Does the Future Hold?
Question: geopolitics, unipolar versus multipolar
Chomsky: First there are two crises that determine whether it is even appropriate to consider how geopolitics will look in the future: (1) threat of nuclear war (2) the climate crisis.
“If the climate crisis is not dealt with in the next few years, human society is essentially finished. Everything else is moot unless these two crises are dealt with.”
(This paragraph is not part of Chomsky’s answer) Regarding Chomsky’s warning, several key indicators of the climate crisis are flashing red, not green. For example, nine years ago 195 nations at the UN climate conference Paris ‘15 agreed to take measures to mitigate CO2 emissions to hold global warming to under 1.5°C pre-industrial. Yet, within only nine years of that agreement amongst 195 nations, according to Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial for the first time in human history for a 12-month period from February 2023 to January 2024 and now fast approaching danger zones. Obviously, nations of the world did not follow their own dictates, and if not them, who will?
Paleoclimatology has evidence of what to expect if the “climate crisis,” as labeled by Chomsky, is not dealt with (The following paragraph is also not part of Chomsky’s answer): “While today’s CO2-driven climate change scenario is unprecedented in human history, similar circumstances existed in the geological record that give us an idea of what to expect in the way of global sea level rise, and the process that will get us there. About 3.2 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch, CO2 levels were about 400 ppm (427 ppm today) and temperatures were 2-3°C above the “pre-industrial” temperatures of 1850-1880. At the same time, proxy data indicate global sea level was about 52 feet (within a 39-foot to 66-foot range) higher than today.” (Source: The Sleeping Giant Awakens, Climate Adaptation Center, May 21, 2024)
Maybe that is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) strongly suggests keeping temperatures ideally below 1.5°C and certainly not above 2.0°C pre-industrial.
Chomsky on World Power: Currently the center of world power, whether unipolar or multipolar is very much in the news. This issue has roots going back to the end of WWII when the US established overwhelming worldwide power. But now the Ukraine war has the world very much divided with most of world outside of the EU, US and its allies calling for diplomatic settlement. But the US position is that the war must continue to severely weaken Russia.
Consequently, Ukraine is dividing the world, and it shows up in the framework of unipolar versus multipolar. For example, the war has driven the EU away from independent status to firm control by the US. In turn the EU is headed towards industrial decline because of disruption of its natural trading partners, e.g., Russia is full of natural resources that the EU is lacking, which economist have always referred to as a “marriage made in heaven,” a natural trading relationship that has now been broken. (footnote: EU industrial production down 3.9% past 12 months)
And the Ukrainian imbroglio is cutting off EU access to markets in China e.g., China has been an enormous market for German industrial products. Meanwhile, the US is insisting upon a unipolar framework of world order that wants not only the EU but the world to be incorporated within something like the NATO system. Under US pressure NATO has expanded its reach to the Indo-Pacific region, meaning NATO is now obligated to take part in the US conflict with China.
Meantime, the rest of the world is trying to develop a multipolar world with several independent sectors of power. The BRICS countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, Indonesia, South Africa, want an independent source of power of their own. They are 40% of world economy that’s independent of US sanctions and of the US dollar.
These are developing conflicts over one raging issue and one developing issue. Ukraine is the raging issue; the developing issue is US conflict with China, which is developing its own projects in Eurasia, Africa, Middle East, South Africa, S9uth Asia, and Latin America.
The US is determined to prevent China’s economic development throughout the world. The Biden administration has “virtually declared a kind of war with China” by demanding that Western allies refuse to permit China to carry out technological development.
For example, the US insist others do not all0w China access to any technology that has any US parts in it. This includes everything, as for example, Netherlands has a world-class lithographic industry which produces critical parts for semi-conductors for the modern high-tech economy. Now, Netherlands must determine whether it’ll move to an independent course to sell to China, or not… the same is true for Samsung, South Korea, and Japan.
The world is splintered along those lines as the framework for the foreseeable future.
Question: Will multinational corporations gain too much power and influence?
Chomsky suggests looking at them right now… US based multinationals control about one-half of the world’s wealth. They are first or second in every domain like manufacturing and retail; no one else is close. It’s extraordinary power. Based upon GDP, the US has 20% of world GDP, but if you look at US multinationals it’s more like 50%. Multinationals have extraordinary power over domestic policy in both the US and in other capitalistic countries. So, how will multinationals react when told they cannot deal with a major market, like China?
How does this develop over future years? The EU is going into a period of decline because of breaking relationships in trade and commercial business with the East. Yet, it’s not sure that the EU will stay subordinate to the US and willingly go into decline, or will the EU join the rest of the world and move into a more complex multipolar world and integrate with countries in the East? This is yet to be determined. For example, France’s President Emmanuel Macron (2017-) has been vilified and condemned for saying that after Russia is driven out of Ukraine, a way must be found to accommodate Russia within an international system, an initial crack in the US/EU relationship.
Threat of nuclear warquestion: Russia suspended the START Nuclear Arms Treaty with the US and how important is this to the threat of nuclear war?
Chomsky: It is very significant. It is the last remaining arms control treaty, the new START Treaty, Trump almost cancelled it. The treaty was due to expire in February when Biden took over in time to extend it, which he did.
Keep in mind that the US was instrumental in creating a regime which somewhat mitigates the threat of nuclear war, which means “terminal war.” We talk much too casually about nuclear war. There can’t be a nuclear war. If there is, we’re finished. It’s why the Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been.
Starting with George W. Bush the US began dismantling arms control. Bush dismantled the ABM Treaty, a missile treaty very significantly part of the arms control system and an enormous threat to Russia. So, the dismantling allowed the US to set up installations right at the border of Russia. It’s a severe threat to Russia. And Russia has reacted.
The Trump administration got rid of the INF Treaty, the Reagan-Gorbachev treaty of 1987 which ended short-range missiles in Europe. Those missiles are now back in place on the borders of Russia. Trump, to make it clear that we meant business, arranged missile launches right away upon breaking of the treaty.
Trump destroyed the Open Skies Treaty which originated with Eisenhower stating that each side should share information about what the other side was doing to reduce the threat of misunderstanding.
Only the new START Treaty remains. And Russia suspended it. START restricts the number of strategic weapons for each side. The treaty terminates in 2026, but it’s suspended by Russia anyway. So, in effect there are no agreed upon restraints to increasing nuclear weapons.
Both sides already have way more nuclear weapons than necessary; One Trident nuclear submarine could destroy a couple hundred cities all over the world. And land based nuclear missile locations are known by both sides. So, if there is a threat, those would be hit immediately. Which means if there’s a threat, “you’d better send’em off, use’em or lose’em.” This obviously is a very touchy, extraordinarily risky situation because one mistake could amplify very quickly.
The new START Treaty that’s been suspended by Russia did restrict the enormous excessive number of strategic weapons. So, we should be in negotiations right now to expand it, restore it, and reinstitute the treaties the US has dismantled, the INF Treaty, Reagan-Gorbachev treaty, ABM Treaty, Open Stars Treaty should all be brought back.
Question: Will society muster the will for change for equity, prosperity, and sustainability?
Chomsky: There is no answer. It’s up to the population to come to grips with issues and say we are not going to march to the precipice and fall over it. But it’s exactly what our leaders are telling us to do. Look at the environmental crisis. It is well understood that we may have enough time to control heating of the environment, destruction of habitat, destruction of the oceans which is going to lead to total catastrophe. It’s not like everybody will die all at once, but we’re going to reach irreversible tipping points that becomes just a steady decline. To know how serious it is, look at particular areas of the world.
The Middle East region is one of the most rapidly heating regions of the world at rates twice as fast as the rest of the world. Projections by the end of the century at current trajectories show sea level in Mediterranean will rise about 10 feet.
Look at a map where people live, it is indescribable. Around Southeast Asia and peasants in India are trying to survive temperatures in the 120s where less than 10% of population has air conditioning. This will cause huge migrations from areas of the world where life will become unlivable.
Fossil fuel companies are so profitable that they’ve decided to quit any sustainable efforts in favor of letting profits run as fast and as far as possible. They’re opening new oil and gas fields that can produce another 30-40 years but at that point we’ll all be finished.
We have the same issue with nuclear weapons as with the environment. If these two issues are not dealt with, in the not-too-distant future, it’ll be all over. The population needs to “have the will” to stop it.
Question: How do we muster that will?
Chomsky: Talk to neighbors, join community organizations, join activist’s groups, press Congress, get out into the streets if necessary. How have things happened in the past? For example, back in the 1960s small groups of women got together, forming consciousness-raising groups and it was 1975 (Sex Discrimination Act) that women were granted the right of persons peers under US domestic law, prior to that we’re still back in the age of the founding fathers when women were property Look at the Civil Rights movement. Go back to the 1950s, Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on a bus that was planned by an organized group of activists that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, big change… in 1960 a couple of black students in No. Carolina decided to sit in at a lunch counter segregated. Immediately arrested, and the next day another group came… later they became organized as SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinated Committee. Young people from the North started to join. Next freedom buses started running to Alabama to convince black farmers to cast a vote. It went on this way, building, until you got civil rights legislation in Washington.
What’s happening right now as an example of what people can do? The Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, IRA. It’s mostly a climate change act. The only way you can get banks and fossil fuel companies to stop destroying the world is to bribe them. That’s basically our system. But IRA is not the substantial program that Biden presented. It is watered down. The original came out of Bernie Sander’s office. As for the background for that, young people, from the Sunrise Movement, were active and organizing and sat in on Congressional offices. AOC joined them. A bill came out of this, but Republican opposition cut back the original bill by nearly 100% They are a denialist party. They want to destroy the world in the interest of private profit. The final IRA bill is nowhere near enough.
Summation: Chomsky sees a world of turmoil trying to sort out whether unipolar or multipolar wins the day with the Ukrainian war serving as a catalyst to change. Meanwhile, the EU carries the brunt of its impact. Meantime, nuclear arms treaties have literally dissolved in the face of a tenuous situation along the Russia/EU borders with newly armed missiles pointed at Russia’s heartland. In the face of this touch-and-go Russia vs. the West potentially explosive scenario, the global climate system is under attack via excessive fossil fuel emissions cranking up global temperatures beyond what 195 countries agreed was a danger zone.
Chomsky sees a nervous nuclear weapons-rattling high-risk world flanked by unmitigated deterioration of ecosystems that global warming steadily, assuredly takes down for the count, as global temperatures set new records. He calls for individuals to take action, do whatever necessary to change the trajectory of nuclear weaponry and climate change to save society. Chomsky offered several examples of small groups of people acting together, over time, turning into serious protests and ultimately positive legislation.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” (Margaret Mead, Anthropologist)
This story uses screenshots and not actual tweets in view of the graphic nature of the video being fact-checked.
The political unrest that erupted in Bangladesh following the student protests over reservation descended into a disturbing path marked by escalating violence. In the wake of this turmoil, Sheikh Hasina was compelled to step down from her position as Prime Minister and flee the country on August 5. This was followed by several incidents of attacks on the minority Hindu community. Against this backdrop, numerous videos and images related to the violence began circulating widely on Indian social media platforms.
One such video shows a girl being beaten up and harassed by a mob. The clip has been widely shared with the claim that the girl is a Hindu and that she was being targeted and harassed by individuals from the Muslim community. The footage reveals women dressed in burqas and men wearing caps that are commonly associated with the Muslim community.
Ashwini Shrivastava, a Right-wing social media user, tweeted the video with similar claims. At the time this article being written, the video has received more than 9 Lakh views. (Archived link)
Lawyer and BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay also tweeted this video and wrote that the biggest enemies of Hindus were converted Hindus. (Archived link)
Many more X users have posted this video with the same claim.
Alt News observed that Shohanur Rahman, a fact-checker from Bangladesh-based outlet ‘Rumor Scanner’, had replied to Ashwini Srivastava’s tweet. Commenting on the alleged incident, he clarified that the woman seen in the video was not a Hindu as claimed, but a member of the Muslim community. Alt News, respecting the sensitivity of the situation, has chosen not to disclose the name of the victim in this report. The incident in question occurred on August 7 in the Tanker Par area of the Brahmanbaria district. The woman is reportedly a worker of the Mahila Chhatra League, a student wing of Sheikh Hasina’s political party, the Awami League. It appears that her association with this organisation was the reason she was targeted by the mob.
Based on this information, we performed a keyword search in Bengali on Facebook, which led us to a 6:48 second long related video. In one of the frames from this footage, we identified the words ‘Loknath Tank, B Baria’ inscribed on a wall. The caption of this Facebook post also corroborated this location, mentioning ‘Brahmanbaria Tank’ and ‘Chhatra League leader.’
It is important for readers to note that in both this longer Facebook video and the shorter viral video, a girl dressed in a black salwar suit with a red dupatta can be seen standing beside the victim. This individual appears prominently in both videos.
While investigating, Alt News found two Facebook videos of this incident. (Link 1, Link 2) After carefully analysing both videos, we observed a pink purse that was present in both. In the first video, the victim is seen clutching this pink purse. In the second video, the girl wearing the black suit and red dupatta is shown retrieving documents and other items from this pink purse.
In this second Facebook video, the girl wearing the black suit takes out the victim’s ID card and shows it to the camera, which is from the Upazila Parishad elections. After seeing this ID card, it becomes clear that the victim girl is a Muslim. Below is a Google-translated version of the ID card which is in Bengali.
To sum it up, a woman seen being harassed by a mob in this viral video is actually not a Hindu, but a Muslim. She was attacked due to her association with the Awami League.
Alt News debunked two similar false claims in the recent past where attacks on student leaders of Awami League in educational institutions were passed as targeted attack on Hindus. (1, 2)
New Delhi, August 15, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on the Indian government to ensure proper consultation with media publishers before enacting a broadcast regulation bill that journalists fear will give authorities sweeping powers to control online content.
“India’s planned broadcast bill could have a chilling effect on press freedom,” CPJ’s Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi said on Thursday. “We are extremely concerned by the opacity surrounding the proposed law and its enactment process, and urge the Indian authorities to be transparent to ensure the bill is not tantamount to online censorship.”
They would also have to set up internal vetting committees at their own expense to approve content before it is posted online. Failure to comply could result in imprisonment and fines.
The provisions in the bill came after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party lost support in a national election earlier this year – a development that supporters blamed partly on social media influencers for boosting the opposition’s chances.
Following criticism, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said on X, formerly Twitter, that a fresh draft bill will be published and it would extend the deadline for stakeholder comments until October 15, 2024.
The ministry did not respond to CPJ’s emailed requests for comment.
Thousands took to the streets of Kolkata in India early Thursday to condemn the rape and murder of a local doctor. Protests have swelled as people demand justice for the victim, and an end to violence against women more broadly. The discovery of the 31-year-old woman’s brutalised body last week at a state-run hospital has sparked nationwide protests.
She cannot be named in accordance with India’s laws that protect the identity of rape victims. Large crowds marched through the streets of Kolkata in West Bengal to condemn the killing, with a candlelight rally at midnight coinciding with the start of India’s independence day celebrations on Thursday.
The protesters in Kolkata, who marched under the slogan “reclaim the night”, called for a wider tackling of violence against women and held up handwritten signs demanding action.
“We want justice,” read one sign at the rally. Marcher Monalisa Guha told Kolkata’s the Telegraph:
The atrocities against women do not stop.
Another marcher, Sangeeta Halder, told the paper:
We face harassment almost on a daily basis. But not stepping out because of fear is not the solution.
‘Anger in the nation’
Doctors are also demanding swift justice and better workplace security in the wake of the killing. Many doctors in government hospitals across several states on have chosen to halt elective services “indefinitely” in protest.
Protests have since occurred in several other hospitals across the country, including in the capital.
Dhruv Chauhan, from the Indian Medical Association’s Junior Doctors’ Network, told the Press Trust of India news agency:
Doctors nationwide are questioning what is so difficult about enacting a law for our security.
The strike will continue until all demands are formally met.
The Telegraph on Thursday praised the “spirited public protests” across India. In an editorial it said:
Hearteningly, doctors and medical organisations are not the only ones involved. The ranks of the protesters have been swelled by people from all walks of life.
Institutional mishandling suspected
Indian media have reported the murdered doctor was found in the teaching hospital’s seminar hall, suggesting she had gone there for a brief rest during a long shift.
An autopsy has confirmed sexual assault, and in a petition to the court, the victim’s parents have said that they suspected their daughter was gang-raped, according to Indian broadcaster NDTV.
Shockingly, hospital administrators at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, where the murder took place, initially claimed the woman’s death was a suicide. As the Conversationreported, this was in spite of the postmortem report which found that:
the killed medical trainee had a broken collar and pelvic bones and severe genital injury.
In the early hours of Thursday, a mob of some 40 people angry at authorities’ handling of the case stormed the grounds of the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, the site of the murder. The men smashed property and hurled stones at police, who fired tear gas in response.
Though police have detained a man who worked at the hospital helping people navigate busy queues, officers have been accused of mishandling the case.
Kolkata’s High Court on Tuesday transferred the case to the elite Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to “inspire public confidence”.
Reminiscent of Delhi bus rape
Sexual violence against women is a widespread problem with an average of nearly 90 rapes a day were reported in 2022 in the country of 1.4 billion people.
For many, the gruesome nature of the attack has invoked comparisons with the horrific 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman on a Delhi bus.
The woman became a symbol of the socially conservative country’s failure to tackle sexual violence against women.
Her death sparked huge demonstrations in Delhi and elsewhere. Under pressure, the government introduced harsher penalties for rapists, and the death penalty for repeat offenders. Several new sexual offences were also introduced, including stalking and jail sentences for officials who failed to register rape complaints.
Long fight
Indian women have long campaigned – via work in human rights organisations, protests, and much more – to stamp out violence against women. But, the problems are embedded in institutional and social norms. For example, New Internationalistreported that:
Marital rape is still not a crime in India, despite the fact that it is disturbingly common. Among married women aged 18-49 who have experienced sexual violence, 83 per cent reported their current husband – and 13 per cent their ex-husband – as the perpetrator.
Violence against women is a global problem, and eradicating it requires widespread confrontation of sexist and patriarchal attitudes that uphold male violence as a fact of life.
The Indian government has introduced over 100 high-yielding, climate-resilient varieties of crops for farmers, a group among the country’s most vulnerable to global warming.
India has unveiled 109 future-facing varieties of crops for an agricultural sector ravaged by climate change and extreme weather events.
The new biofortified varieties – spanning a total of 61 field and horticultural crops – are said to be high in yield and resilient to the effects of climate change. They were introduced at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (commonly known as the Pusa Institute) in New Delhi, delivering on a promise made in the finance ministry’s 2024-25 budget last month.
Prime minister Narendra Modi – who has long had a tetchy relationship with India’s farmers – released seeds and planting material at three sites in the demonstration fields of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), which funds the Pusa Institute.
In an address to scientists, the recently reelected head of state said experts from the ICAR, agricultural universities and Krishi Vigyan Kendras (local farm science centres) should “proactively interact with farmers and inform them about new varieties and technology every month”.
Climate-resilient crops now need to be produced on larger scale
Courtesy: Narendra Modi/X
India, the world’s most populous nation, is responsible for 10% of the global agricultural output. The sector contributes to 15% of its GDP, and employs between 43% and 65% of its population. It is the world’s leading producer of pulses, and second-largest producer of wheat, rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables, fruits and cotton.
The new seeds are variants of 34 field crops and 27 horticultural crops. The former includes various cereals like millets, forage crops, oilseeds, pulses, sugarcane, cotton and fibre, while the latter involves fruits, vegetables, plantation crops, tuber crops, spices, flowers and medicinal crops.
Modi met with a group of farmers and told them that the new varieties would benefit them immensely, since they would cut expenditures, add crop value and diversity, have a positive impact on the environment, and withstand the impacts of climate change.
The ICAR scientists who developed the varieties said their brief was to bring underutilised crops to the mainstream. Among the new innovations were rice that can withstand submergence or flooding, climate-resilient guava, a green gram variety customised for the National Capital Region surrounding Delhi, heat-tolerant durum wheat, high-calcium finger millet, and a superior mango variety, according to local media.
Modi outlined the need for higher-nutrition foods in India, and suggested that people have begun demanding and consuming more organic foods – the country expanded its organic farmland by 145% between 2012 and 2022.
Agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan highlighted the central government’s “lab to land” approach in a way that “science reaches the farmer directly”. He added that the seeds of the new varieties will now need to be produced on a large scale, and will reach farmers in three years.
Why India’s agriculture needs more action on climate change
Courtesy: Narendra Modi/X
Climate change has dealt devastating blows to India’s agriculture sector. The country is the largest consumer of groundwater, since farmers depend on a heavily stressed water supply for irrigation. And 65% of its farmland depends on rainwater, but inconsistent rainfall and increasing temperatures are decimating crops.
While it is the second-largest wheat producer, every 1°C increase in temperature brings about a decline in wheat production by four to five million tonnes, according to ICAR. Temperatures have steadily grown in India over the last few decades, with extreme heatwaves sweeping through different parts in recent years. This year has already seen an area in New Delhi record the country’s hottest temperature ever, reaching 52.3°C, while some of its deadliest floods have occurred in the last decade or so.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the nation has lost nearly 70 million hectares of crops due to excessive rainfall or drought. Agriculture is the sector most vulnerable to the climate crisis in India, and was among several industries that suffered a combined $159B in economic losses in 2021 due to lost working hours from extreme weather events.
The Modi government’s rollout of the climate-resilient crop varieties would be welcomed by farmers, and would represent a rare win for the prime minister among this group. During Covid-19, hundreds of thousands of farmers protested against Modi’s move to open up more private investment in agriculture, which they believed would make them vulnerable to low prices.
Farmers were already facing crippling debt – since Modi first took office in 2014, estimates suggest over 100,000 farmers have taken their lives. The sector’s contribution to the GDP has fallen from 35% in 1990-91 to less than a sixth now, and 82% of it is made up of small or marginal farmers.
With climate change exacerbating the financial strains on Indian farmers, the mood has continued to sour. It was touted as an important factor in the surprising national election results this year, where Modi’s party had to rely on a coalition to form a government, following two terms built upon landslide victories.
That said, more needs to be done. Agriculture accounts for 15% of India’s emissions, but two-thirds of this comes from livestock farming. Given it is the leading producer of milk globally, a shift towards plant-based analogues would drastically reduce the country’s climate footprint – if the milk lobby allows, that is.
Residents in western Myanmar who rely on trade with India said they are experiencing food shortages due to the closure of some border crossings with India amid Myanmar’s civil war.
People in Chin state, western Sagaing region and northern Rakhine state said their supplies of rice, cooking oil, salt, fuel and medicine are dwindling because of the trade disruption following the border gate closures.
Indian authorities cited the need to check the flow of illegal goods from Myanmar as the reason, according to local sources.
But Reeta Meena, an Indian Embassy diplomat in Yangon, told Radio Free Asia that the Indian government permits movement through designated border crossing points, including ones at Tamu-Moreh, Rikhawdar-Zokhawthar and Zorinpui-Paletwa.
Any restrictions might have been imposed by Myanmar or local authorities, she told Radio Free Asia.
But those who have stayed behind have struggled to get goods from India amid periodic border closures due to fighting in their areas, while communication blackouts have cut them off from key cities in Myanmar.
Myanmar permits legal international trade with India via the two crossings at Tamu-Moreh in Sagaing region and Rikhawdar-Zokhawthar in Chin state.
The Moreh-Tamu border gate has remained closed on the Indian side since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
‘Severe difficulties’
But the recent closures of other crossings have led to shortages of basic food items, said a Tamu resident.
“Indian products, such as food and basic consumer goods, are no longer available to local residents living along the border, creating severe difficulties for them,” the resident said. “Job opportunities are scarce, making it increasingly challenging for them to afford basic necessities.”
Indian authorities announced that the Myanmar-India border gate, which connects Rikhawdar in Chin state with India’s Mizoram state, would be closed from July 25 to Aug. 7, though Myanmar residents say it is unlikely to reopen until Aug. 12.
As a result of this closure, prices of goods in Rikhawdar have surged, with people paying twice as much for goods as they did before, Myanmar locals said.
Since November 2023, Rikhawdar has been under the control of Chin defense forces who oppose Myanmar’s ruling military junta and have jointly established a public administration focused on the India-Myanmar border trade, public security and regional stability.
A spokesman for the Regional Defense Force-Hualngoram, the other organization involved in setting up the town’s administration, expressed hope that the Mizoram state government would take measures to help locals obtain essential supplies from India.
“The closure of the bridge, which we rely on for the flow of goods, has made things more difficult,” he said. “We are currently facing a crisis.”
Because Mizoram residents rely on produce from Myanmar, a prolonged border crossing closure would negatively impact both sides, said Salai Van Sui Sang, deputy director of the Institute of Chin Affairs.
It also could lead to tensions between residents of Mizoram and their state government, he added.
Arakan Army
Some internal trade routes, which run directly between towns in India and western Myanmar, have been cut off because of fighting between junta soldiers and resistance forces in Chin state’s Paletwa and in Rakhine state — areas controlled by the rebel Arakan Army. As a result, Myanmar residents must rely on products from Lawngtlai in Mizoram state.
But since June 24, the Central Young Lai Association, an influential NGO in Lawngtlai, has banned the export of goods. Though it allowed some items, including basic foodstuffs, to be transported again in July, restrictions on fuel and fertilizer remain in place.
On Aug. 7, the organization warned it would take action against the transport of prohibited fuel and fertilizer from Lawngtlai, but did not provide specifics.
Goods transported from Lawngtlai have been banned because the Arakan Army said they were being used to supply junta forces attacking Chin armed groups.
Translated by Kalyar Lwin for RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.
The days of tactical vehicles being manufactured solely for the military are declining. Commercial off-the-shelf have been favoured by many nations, but do they really fit the brief? Light tactical vehicles are a staple of any military and, because of their relative simplicity to build, they are widely manufactured in the Asia-Pacific region. However, when […]
Bangladesh was plunged into an unprecedented crisis with erstwhile Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina ousted on August 5 after a month-long nationwide student protest. An interim government led by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus is expected to be sworn in on August 8.
Against this backdrop, a video has gone viral on social media which users claim shows the looting of a shopping outlet in Bangladesh owned by a Hindu. Several Right-wing accounts have shared the video with the same claim. User @VoiceofHindu71, who has been fact-checked several times by Alt News, shared the video and garnered over 670000 views. (Archive)
— Voice of Bangladeshi Hindus (@VoiceofHindu71) August 6, 2024
@visegrad24, another verified account which frequently amplifies misinformation, also tweeted the video with the same claim. This tweet garnered over 200000 views. (Archive)
Islamists in Bangladesh incite a crowd to loot a Hindu-owned store in the Chittagong Market.
Hindus are losing lives, homes and property due to the Islamist attacks against them after the government was overthrown yesterday.
In the viral video, we also noticed a shop named ‘On Fire’. Using Google Maps, we geo-located the incident to Mohammadpur, Dhaka. The store being looted was one of the many outlets of a luxury Bangladeshi brand named Yellow.
YELLOW, whose parent brand is BEXIMCO, has 19 stores across Bangaldesh and an online platform serving Bangladesh and Canada. Their products include clothing, fragrances, accessories, home textiles, ceramics, paintings, and books. The Bangladesh Export Import Company Limited or BEXIMCO Group is the largest private sector group in Bangladesh founded in the 1970s by two brothers – Ahmed Sohail Fasihur Rahman and Salman Fazlur Rahman.
Salman Fazlur Rahman held the position of an adviser (private industry and investment) to former Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina, with the status of a cabinet minister.
Before Hasina resigned on Monday, August 5, Rahman fled the country on Sunday. Rioters reportedly broke into the home of Salman F Rahman, Hasina’s financial adviser, looting artwork and household items and setting vehicles on fire. In the video, a woman is heard saying, “Take whatever you can. Take everything. You are doing great work. Very good, very good.”
Several Yellow stores across the country were attacked. In Dhanmondi, protesters set a YELLOW showroom on fire. According to eyewitnesses, even fire service personnel were initially deterred by the protesters. Later in the evening, they returned and attempted to extinguish the fire. Another Facebook post showed a Yellow outlet in Halishahar being looted.
Hence, a viral video of a YELLOW store in Mohammadpur, Dhaka, being looted is falsely amplified as visuals of a Hindu-owned establishment being looted. In reality, Yellow is a brand owned by Bangladeshi billionaire and Sheikh Hasina’s aide, Salman Fazlur Rahman.
India has offered to provide Vietnam with US$300 million to strengthen its maritime security amid rising tensions in the Asia-Pacific region and increasing wariness in both countries about China’s growing military might and assertiveness.
India’s pledge was made during a visit to India this week by Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, during which he and his host, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, virtually inaugurated a military software hub in the city of Nha Trang in central Vietnam.
The Army Software Park is being developed with India’s assistance and is expected to produce software solutions as well as provide information technology services.
Modi said at a welcome ceremony for Chinh at Hyderabad House on Thursday that Vietnam was an important partner in India’s Act East Policy and Indo-Pacific vision.
The Act East Policy is a diplomatic initiative to promote economic, strategic and cultural relations with the vast Asia-Pacific region at different levels.
Both countries would “continue cooperation for a free, open, rules-based and prosperous Indo-Pacific,” Modi said.
This visit from July 30 to Aug. 1 was Chinh’s first trip to India as head of government.
The leaders said in a joint communique at the end of the visit that Vietnam and India “agreed to strengthen further their defense cooperation based on common priorities and interests, and to contribute to the stability in the Indo-Pacific region.”
A package of preferential loans worth US$300 million would be offered for two projects to improve Vietnam’s maritime security, they said.
They did not specify details but Indian media said the money would be spent on procuring two types of patrol boats for the Vietnamese navy.
In June 2023, India donated to Vietnam a missile corvette, the INS Kirpan, and also sold it 12 high-speed guard boats.
Rule-based South China Sea
Maritime security is seen as one of the most important elements of Vietnam-India bilateral relations and they have held regular maritime security dialogues since 2019.
The joint communique emphasized the importance of “maintaining peace, stability, security and freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea.”
Both countries are committed to finding peaceful solutions to maritime disputes in accordance with international law, in particular the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, they said.
They stressed that UNCLOS is the legal framework for all maritime activities in the region and the basis for all claims over jurisdiction.
Vietnam, together with other ASEAN countries, and China are negotiating a code of conduct for parties in the South China Sea.
India and the United States are not involved in those talks but the two leaders called in their communique for a rule-based and effective code of conduct that “does not affect rights and jurisdictions of other countries, including those not taking part in the negotiation process.”
China has warned against what it sees as the “intervention” of outside countries in South China Sea disputes.
Edited by Taejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has arrived in India on an official visit with security and defense cooperation high on the agenda.
This is Chinh’s first visit as head of the government and also the first visit by a Vietnamese prime minister to India in 10years.
Chinh is the second foreign leader, after Bangladesh prime minister Sheik Hasina, to visit Delhi since Narendra Modi began his third term as India’s prime minister.
Security and defense are two core “pillars” in Vietnam-India relations, said the office of Vietnam’s prime minister.
Delhi is one of Hanoi’s seven comprehensive strategic partners – the top tier of bilateral relations – on par with China, Russia and the United States.
Prime Minister Modi once said that Vietnam is an important pillar of India’s Act East Policy.
The two countries signed a Joint Vision Statement on a defense partnership, as well as a memorandum of understanding on mutual logistics support in June 2022 during a visit to Vietnam by India’s defense minister Rajnath Singh.
“Vietnam-India defense cooperation went back a long time,” said Yusuf Unjhawala, an Indian defense analyst.
India donated a domestically built missile corvette, INS Kirpan, to Vietnam in June 2023 and “also sold a number of smaller vessels to Hanoi,” Unjhawala told RFA, referring to high-speed guard boats built in both India and in Vietnam under an Indian credit scheme.
The Indian Navy’s anti-submarine warfare corvette INS Kiltan visiting Cam Ranh port in Vietnam on May 12, 2024. (Vietnam Defense Ministry)
India’s naval vessels have been allowed to make port calls in Vietnam.
“Hopefully this can be elevated to another level with a mutual logistics agreement” to grant the Indian navy better access to Vietnam’s strategic port of Cam Ranh, he said.
Maritime cooperation
Both Vietnam and India are wary of China’s growing military might and assertiveness.
Maritime security is seen as one of the most important parts of Vietnam-India bilateral relations and they have held regular maritime security dialogues since 2019.Vietnam is embroiled in an intense territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea and is keen to upgrade its navy and boost its capabilities.
Vietnam is also looking to diversify its defense industry to end dependence on Soviet and Russian weaponry and India could provide a promising alternative, the Bangalore-based analyst Unjhawala said.
BrahMos Aerospace – a joint venture between India and Russia – is in talks to export its supersonic cruise missiles to Southeast Asian countries including Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.
The company has begun delivering shore-based anti-ship missile systems to the Philippines under a US$375-million contract and Vietnam has indicated its interest in acquiring similar missiles, according to the defense intelligence company Janes.
Vietnam’s defense minister Phan Van Giang and his Indian counterpart Rajnath Singh during Giang’s visit to Delhi, June 19, 2023. (Vietnam Defense Ministry)
RFA’s sources said Vietnam is also exploring possibilities to purchase India’s indigenous medium-range mobile surface-to-air missile (SAM) Akash systems.
India has also provided a multi-million-dollar grant to develop an Army Software Park in Vietnam.
While it is unclear whether any arms contract would be signed during the Vietnamese prime minister’s visit to India, it is almost certain that discussions are underway on strengthening security cooperation, analysts said.
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
India has released its annual Budget this week, with a climate finance taxonomy and spending on resilient crop varieties among the key takeaways for climate change and agriculture.
This week, Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the country’s annual Budget for a record seventh consecutive year. It was also the first Budget announced by India’s NDA coalition government, which was re-elected for a third straight term in June, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Contrary to expectations, the BJP didn’t win an absolute majority on its own, let alone reach its predicted number of seats that would have given the right-wing party a supermajority in the party. After landslide victories in the previous two elections, that the BJP had to rely on coalition partners to form a government signalled a shift in the national sentiment.
India voted against religious persecution, segregation and nationalism, rejecting the polarised environment cultivated by the ruling party in the last decade. But another huge factor was largely in the background: climate change.
The six-week-long elections were held amid heatwaves in several parts of India, leading to record-high temperatures and dozens of deaths. Climate change was missing from candidates’ messaging, despite one of the biggest backlashes against the BJP’s tenure coming from farmers, a group even more adversely affected by the climate crisis.
The finance ministry this week suggested that India’s annual per capita emissions are a third of the global average – but these have also risen by 93% since 2001. Its climate target (or nationally determined contribution) has been deemed “highly insufficient” by the Climate Action Tracker, with current policies and action rated as “insufficient” too.
India is now the most populous country, and also the world’s third-largest polluter – it can’t afford to ignore climate change.
India ups climate investment, to create a climate taxonomy
Courtesy: PTI
In the Union Budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year, Sitharaman has allotted ₹3,265.53 crores ($390M) to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), a 6% improvement on the ₹3,079.4 crores ($367.9M) set aside last year.
As part of its efforts to meet its climate goals, India will also develop a climate taxonomy to classify economic activities in line with green commitments and broader environmental goals. “We will develop a taxonomy for climate finance for enhancing the availability of capital for climate adaptation and mitigation. This will support [the] achievement of the country’s climate commitments and green transition,” said Sitharaman.
According to the UN Environment Programme, taxonomies provide clear science-based definitions, help avoid greenwashing, and help identify eligible assets, activities or projects that are low-carbon, align with climate-friendly economic development, or are environmentally sustainable.
But while the move has been hailed by some, others have raised concerns about possible greenwashing. “India’s climate finance taxonomy could prove helpful and would be a move towards the ‘Paris alignment’ of finance in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Sehr Raheja, programme officer at think tank Centre for Science and Environment.
“Whether the tagging of activities improves finance for climate or brings in risks of greenwashing remains to be seen after it is released,” he added.
Aarti Khosla, director of consulting firm Climate Trends, said: “The budget lacks timelines for announcements on taxonomy, carbon pricing mechanisms and detailed strategies for mobilising climate finance for adaptation and mitigation efforts in vulnerable communities.”
Additionally, the Budget allocated ₹220 crores ($26M) for the National Mission for a Green India, a 37.5% hike from last year. The initiative aims to preserve forest cover and protect citizens from the impacts of the climate crisis.
One of the nine priorities of India’s latest Budget was productivity and resilience in agriculture, a sector that received ₹1.52 crores ($18.15B) for the next fiscal year.
Sitharaman announced that the Indian government will undertake a comprehensive review of research to develop climate-resilient seeds, and release 109 new high-yielding and climate-resilient varieties of 32 field and horticultural crops for farmers in 2024-25.
Meanwhile, in the next two years, 10 million farmers would be initiated into natural farming – which emphasises modern ecology, recycling, and on-farm resource optimisation – supported by certification and branding. This will be implemented through scientific institutions and rural councils, alongside the establishment of 10,000 need-based bio-input resource centres.
The finance minister further outlined plans to shift large-scale vegetable production closer to major consumption centres. “We will promote farmer producer organisations, coops and startups for vegetable supply chains, including for collection, storage, and marketing,” she said.
The government will also boost the production and marketing of crops like mustard, groundnut, sesame, soybean and sunflower to achieve self-sufficiency in oilseeds and pulses, which are vital sources of plant proteins in the country.
In another move to help small and medium-sized startups sell products internationally., India will establish e-commerce export hubs via a public-private partnership. A marker of such success is Kanpur-based OatMlk, which last year began exporting its plant-based milk to the UAE and Singapore, and has now landed in speciality stores in the UK.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India is currently working on a regulatory framework for novel foods like cultivated meat. In a move that would potentially interest the smart protein sector, SItharaman announced that the government will set up 100 accredited food safety labs nationwide.
“We commend the government’s continued dedication to advancing agriculture and food processing, as reflected in the latest budget,” said Sneha Singh, acting managing director of alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) India. She labelled the introduction of climate-resilient crops as “a significant stride towards sustainable agriculture”, and said self-sufficiency in pulses and oilseeds would “create more pathways for value-added products such as plant proteins”.
“These initiatives will not only enhance food security but also bolster agricultural sidestreams and help localise and accelerate the alternative protein sector,” explained Singh. “Continued support for entrepreneurship, particularly through schemes benefiting MSMEs and startups, is a promising move that will drive growth and innovation in smart proteins, especially cultivated and fermentation-derived proteins.”
The citizens of India have a problem. In what the media like to call ‘the world’s biggest democracy’, there is a serious, proven conflict of interest among officials in the areas of science, agriculture and agricultural research that results in privileging the needs of powerful private interests ahead of farmers and ordinary people.
This has been a longstanding concern. In 2013, for instance, prominent campaigner and environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues said:
The Ministry of Agriculture has handed Monsanto and the industry access to our agri-research public institutions, placing them in a position to seriously influence agri-policy in India. You cannot have a conflict of interest larger or more alarming than this one.
In 2020, Kavitha Kuruganti (Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture) stated that the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee had acted more like a servant for Monsanto — there is an ongoing revolving door between crop developers (even patent holders) and regulators, with developers-cum-lobbyists sitting on regulatory bodies.
However, the capture of public policymaking space by the private sector is set to accelerate due to a recent spate of memorandums of understanding between state institutions and influential private corporations involved in agriculture and agricultural services, including Bayer and Amazon.
Corporate capture
As part of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and Amazon (June 2023), farmers will produce for Amazon Fresh stores in India as part of a ‘farm to fork’ supply chain. It will see “critical inputs” in agriculture and “season-based crop plans” in collaboration with Amazon based on “technologies, capacity building and transfer of new knowledge.”
This corporate jargon ties in with the much-publicised notion of ‘data-driven agriculture’ centred on cloud-based data information services (which Amazon also offers). In this model, data is to be accessed and controlled by corporates and the farmer will be told how much production is expected, how much rain is anticipated, what type of soil quality there is, what must be produced and what type of genetically engineered seeds and inputs they must purchase and from whom.
This has been described as the recolonisation of Indian agriculture, which will eventually involve a handful of data owners (Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet etc.), input suppliers (Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, Cargill etc.) and retail concerns (Amazon and Walmart-Flipkart — both firms already control 60% of India’s e-commerce market) at the commanding heights of the agrifood economy, determining the nature of agriculture and peddling industrial food. Farmers who remain in this AI-driven system (a stated aim is farmerless farms) will be reduced to exploitable labour at the mercy of global conglomerates.
This is part of a broader strategy to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture, ensure India’s food dependence on global finance and foreign corporations and eradicate any semblance of food democracy (or national sovereignty). [1]
In addition to the MoU with Amazon, an MoU was signed between the ICAR and Bayer in September 2023. Bayer (it bought Monsanto in 2018), which profits from various environmentally harmful and disease-causing chemicals like glyphosate, signed the MoU to help “develop resource-efficient, climate-resilient solutions for crops, varieties, crop protection, weed and mechanization”, according to the ICAR website.
The ICAR is responsible for co-ordinating agricultural education and research in India, and Bayer seems likely to exploit the ICAR’s vast infrastructure and networks to pursue its own commercial plans, including boosting sales of toxic proprietary products.
But that’s not all. According to the non-profit GRAIN in its article ‘The corporate agenda behind carbon farming’, Bayer is gaining increasing control over farmers in various countries, dictating exactly how they farm and what inputs they use through its ‘Carbon Program’.
GRAIN says:
You can see in the evolution of Bayer’s programmes that, for corporations, carbon farming is all about increasing their control within the food system. It’s certainly not about sequestering carbon.
Given the seriousness of what is laid out by GRAIN in its article, India’s citizens and farmers should take heed, especially as the ICAR website states that a focus of the MoU with Bayer will be on developing carbon credit markets.
In a letter (14 July 2024) to Rabindra Padaria, principal scientist at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), and Himanshu Pathak, director-general of the ICAR, Aruna Rodrigues says: [2]
Inking in ICAR’s formal partnership with Bayer (Monsanto) quite simply confirms straightforwardly that the ICAR protects its interest, which is the same as those of Bayer-Monsanto, large chemical/herbicide corporates… the ICAR has ditched its mandate to Indian farmers and farming, which is to promote farmer interests as a priority in an unbiased and objective assessment of what is right and good for Indian farming and food…
A separate ‘citizen letter’ (20 July 2024) has also been sent to Pathak on the various MoUs that the Indian government has signed with influential private corporations. [3]Hundreds of scientists, farmer leaders, farmers and ordinary citizens have signed the letter.
It states:
Bayer is a company notorious for its anti-people, anti-nature business products and operations in itself and, furthermore, after its takeover of Monsanto. Its deadly poisons have violated basic human rights of peoples across the world, and it is a company that has always prioritised profits over people and planet.
It goes on to say that it is not clear what the ICAR will learn from Bayer that the well-paid public sector scientists of the institution cannot develop themselves. The letter says entities that have been responsible for causing an economic and environmental crisis in Indian agriculture are being partnered by ICAR for so-called solutions when these entities are only interested in their profits and not sustainability (or any other nomenclature they use).
The letter poses some key questions such as: Where was the democratic debate on carbon credit markets? How is the ICAR ensuring that the farmers get the best rather than biased advice that boosts the further rollout of proprietary products? Is there a system in place for the ICAR to develop research and education agendas from the farmers it is supposed to serve as opposed to being led by the whims and business ideas of corporations?
These are fundamental questions given that agriculture is a state subject as per India’s constitution. It is all the more concerning given that the authors of the citizen letter note that copies of the MoUs are not being shared proactively in the public domain by the ICAR.
The letter asks that the ICAR suspends the signed MoUs, shares all details in the public domain and desists from signing any more such MoUs without necessary public debate.
However, on 19 July, there were reports that the ICAR had signed another MoU, this time with Syngenta for promoting climate resilient agriculture and training programmes. In response, the authors of the letter state that the ICAR has (again) partnered with a corporation that has a track record of anti-nature and anti-people activities, selling toxic products like paraquat, class action suits against its corn seeds and anti-competitive behaviour.
Mutagenic HT rice
It is becoming clear who the ICAR actually serves. Let us return to Aruna Rodrigues and her letter to Rabindra Padaria (IARI) and Himanshu Pathak (ICAR) for additional insight.
Rodrigues’ letter focuses on the commercial cultivation of basmati rice varieties tolerant to imazethapyr-based, non-selective herbicides. These chemicals can be liberally sprayed on herbicide tolerant (HT) crops because the crops have been manipulated to withstand the toxic impacts of spraying.
The HT varieties of rice have undergone some form of mutagenesis rather than genetic engineering. Mutagenesis has traditionally involved subjecting plant cells to chemical or physical agents (e.g. radiation) that cause mutations to the DNA in the hope that a resulting mutation may produce a desirable effect in the plant. This kind of mutation breeding has been used for decades but only affects a minority of the plants on the market. Industry watchdog GMWatch says this risky technology (mutagenesis breeding) in the past managed to escape regulation.
So, this HT crop by the mutagenesis route is not defined as ‘genetic engineering’ (the method usually used to create HT crops) and therefore falls outside the purview of current GM regulations.
Although the Supreme Court-appointed Technical Expert Committee (TEC) bars HT crops (a) for being a HT crop and (b) on account of contamination of crops in a centre of genetic diversity, it has been a long-standing aim of biotech companies like Bayer (Monsanto) to get HT crops cultivated in India.
Rodrigues asks:
Is it a deliberate decision of the ICAR to use the mutagenesis route to produce HT rice varieties (tolerant to imazethapyr) with the explicit objective to bypass the formal regulation of GE crops/GMOs?
Rodrigues accuses the ICAR of effectively ditching its mandate to Indian farmers, many of whom regard organic farming as their competitive advantage. This step is also a potential threat to India’s export markets, which are based on organic standards, along with the necessary co-surety that India’s foods and farms are not contaminated by herbicides, a consequence of using HT crops.
By adding a trait for herbicide tolerance, the ICAR is informed:
ICAR’s action directly impacts this vital issue of contaminating our germ plasm in rice and contravenes a Supreme Court Order of “No Contamination”. Furthermore, our export markets for basmati are in excess of US $5 billion in 2023-24. Your action will also directly impact India’s exports and thereby, impact farmer export potential, incomes and income opportunities that premium prices provide.
Moreover, Rodrigues asserts that the entire mutagenesis process for HT rice must be elaborated, especially when the mutant variety is for the purpose of human consumption. The ICAR is duty-bound to provide, for example, whether a physical or a chemical mutagen was used, the range of doses used and the toxicity for the said material, the herbicide(s) used to test the HT of the basmati rice being used, the concentrations of the herbicides used and the genetic mechanism by which HT rice through mutagenesis has a resistant gene to imazethapyr.
While the issue of intellectual property rights for the HT rice varieties using mutagenesis is unclear, the ICAR and IARI have executed a technology transfer agreement of the HT trait for commercial cultivation.
A failed technology
In her letter, Rodrigues states that, based on empirical evidence of 35 years of HT crops in the US and Argentina, HT crops are a failed technology: it spawns super weeds, increased herbicide use and no added performance yield. Moreover, for India, HT crops are a perverse use of technology, whether genetic engineering or through mutagenesis, that risks small and marginal farmers’ crops and herbs and plants used in many Ayurvedic medicines because of herbicide drift. It will also uniquely impact the employment of women in weeding.
She goes on to state that in the US overall herbicide use has increased more than tenfold since the introduction of HT Crops (1992-2012 figure). In addition, HT crops are designed for monocultures and completely unsuited to Indian small-holder, multi-crop farming: anything not HT will be destroyed, the resistant crop stands, but everything else dies, including non-target organisms.
The herbicides used with HT crops are also a major human health issue. There is a strong link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In relation to this, there are more than 100,000 lawsuits winding their way through US Courts. Glyphosate (used in Bayer’s Roundup herbicide) is also an endocrine disruptor and is linked to birth defects. Rodrigues notes that Monsanto and the US Environmental Protection Agency had both known for over 40 years that glyphosate and its formulations cause cancer.
Other herbicides used by Bayer include glufosinate (used in its Liberty herbicide), which is acknowledged as more toxic than glyphosate and, like it, is a systemic, broad spectrum, non-selective herbicide. It is a neurotoxin that can cause nerve damage and birth defects and is damaging to most plants that come into contact with it.
Glufinosate is banned in Europe and not permitted in India. It has been implicated in brain developmental abnormalities in animal studies and is very persistent in the environment, so it will certainly contaminate water supplies in addition to food where it will be absorbed.
Imazethapyr (contained in Bayer’s Adue herbicide) is also a systemic broad-spectrum herbicide and is banned in some countries and not approved for use in the EU.
Prof. Jack Heinemann (University of Canterbury in New Zealand) adds that the likes of imazethapyr must be tested for their ability to cause bacterial antibiotic resistance. An important concern given that India’s population has some of the highest levels of antibiotic resistance in the world. Any spread of HT crops would put people at severe risk of resistance and disease.
Despite these environmental and health concerns, the herbicide market in India is projected to grow by around 54% in the next five years, from USD 361.85 million in 2024 to USD 558.17 million by 2029.
In her letter, Rodrigues concludes:
In view of the above evidence of serious irreversible harm to health, food and agriculture across several dimensions and contravention of the PP (Precautionary Principle), it is a required scientific response for the ICAR to immediately withdraw HT rice varieties and desist from introducing any HT crop through mutagenesis.
Notes
1. For further insight into this, see Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order by C Todhunter on Globalresearch.ca or Academia.edu.
India Today NE, the India Today group vertical that covers the northeast, reported on Sunday, July 21, that Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had been airlifted from Dhaka to an undisclosed location amid the nationwide crisis over an anti-quota stir that had already claimed over 100 lives.
The report authored by journalist Mehtab Uddin Ahmed was tweeted by the X handle of India Today NE at 2.48 pm with a caption that read, “#Bangladesh: Amidst the chaos, reports confirmed that Prime Minister #SheikhHasina was airlifted from here residence in Dhaka. Her current whereabouts remain unknown.”
Both the report, and the tweet were, however, soon deleted. An archived version of the story can be read here.
Readers should note that this is an updated version of the report and the update was saved close to three hours after the original story was tweeted.
Several users on social media shared the India Today NE report and subsequently deleted their posts as the report got retracted. Some of the posts are still live. (Facebook, X)
False Report by India Today
As the report of Sheikh Hasina being airlifted or leaving the country amid the ongoing crisis caused ripples, Alt News noticed that the language in the updated version of the report was self-contradictory in nature. It said, “reports confirmed that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was allegedly airlifted from her residence in Dhaka.” To have ‘confirmed reports’ on something and then to say that it had ‘allegedly’ happened was inexplicable.
We also noticed that no other media outlet had reported the Bangladesh PM being airlifted. Had it been true, it would certainly have been a major headline across publications. It also appeared strange that the point about Hasina being airlifted was buried in the fourth paragraph of the story under several less important points. The 6-minute video that was embedded in the story did not mention anything about it either.
Next, we tried to look for details about Sheikh Hasina’s schedule on Sunday and found that she had chaired a meeting with the Army top brass on July 21. This was reported by the international media with photos. For example, in its live blog on developments in the country, VoA Bangla published a photo of the said meeting and reported, “প্রধানমন্ত্রী শেখ হাসিনা রবিবার (২১ জুলাই ২০২৪) প্রধানমন্ত্রীর নিরাপত্তা উপদেষ্টা, তিন বাহিনীর প্রধান, মন্ত্রিপরিষদ সচিব ও সশস্ত্রবাহিনী বিভাগের প্রিন্সিপাল স্টাফ অফিসারের সঙ্গে বৈঠক করেছেন। প্রধানমন্ত্রীর কার্যালয় সূত্রে জানা গেছে, তিনি দেশের সামগ্রিক নিরাপত্তা পরিস্থিতির ব্যাপারে তাদের নির্দেশনা দেন।”
[Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Sunday (21 July 2024) held a meeting with the prime minister’s security adviser, the chiefs of the three forces, the cabinet secretary and the principal staff officer of the armed forces. According to sources in the Prime Minister’s office, she gave them instructions regarding the overall security situation of the country.”]
The US-based media outlet’s Bengali arm posted this on its Facebook page as well. The Facebook post contained two photos and it was clearly mentioned that these were from a meeting Sheikh Hasina chaired on Sunday in Dhaka.
Indian digital media outlet The Wall, too, reported that Hasina chaired a meeting at her official residence in Dhaka on Sunday.
On July 21, Alt News reached out to its sources in the Bangladesh deputy high commission in Kolkata, which refuted the report. “India Today itself withdrew the story. And there are reports by the international media which confirm Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s presence in Dhaka. That is enough to show that the report was false,” the source told Alt News on condition of anonymity.
On July 22, The Bangladesh high commission in India officially refuted the report. In a letter to India Today, the high commission said, “…the misinformation on the status of the Government of Bangladesh went viral within a short span of time and triggered huge confusion and anxiety among people at home and abroad. On behalf of the High Commission of Bangladesh, I express my sheer disappointment at the aforesaid erroneous article and post.”
“This kind of misinformation and reporting based on rumour at the time of such critical moment of any country may misguide the people and even add fuel to the crisis and turn the situation into more chaotic. Moreover, such kind of reporting, without gauging the sensitivity, does not only affect the people and the society in large negatively, but also questions the credibility of any news outlet. We request all the news outlets, including the India Today NE, to remain vigil and ensure objective and balanced reporting taking account of the sensitivity of the issue,” it added.
India Today NE published a story on its website on July 22 ‘apologizing’ for the ‘unintentional error’ and attributed it to a “confidential source that could not be immediately verified.”
India Today NE, the India Today group vertical that covers the northeast, reported on Sunday, July 21, that Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had been airlifted from Dhaka to an undisclosed location amid the nationwide crisis over an anti-quota stir that had already claimed over 100 lives.
The report authored by journalist Mehtab Uddin Ahmed was tweeted by the X handle of India Today NE at 2.48 pm with a caption that read, “#Bangladesh: Amidst the chaos, reports confirmed that Prime Minister #SheikhHasina was airlifted from here residence in Dhaka. Her current whereabouts remain unknown.”
Both the report, and the tweet were, however, soon deleted. An archived version of the story can be read here.
Readers should note that this is an updated version of the report and the update was saved close to three hours after the original story was tweeted.
Several users on social media shared the India Today NE report and subsequently deleted their posts as the report got retracted. Some of the posts are still live. (Facebook, X)
False Report by India Today
As the report of Sheikh Hasina being airlifted or leaving the country amid the ongoing crisis caused ripples, Alt News noticed that the language in the updated version of the report was self-contradictory in nature. It said, “reports confirmed that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was allegedly airlifted from her residence in Dhaka.” To have ‘confirmed reports’ on something and then to say that it had ‘allegedly’ happened was inexplicable.
We also noticed that no other media outlet had reported the Bangladesh PM being airlifted. Had it been true, it would certainly have been a major headline across publications. It also appeared strange that the point about Hasina being airlifted was buried in the fourth paragraph of the story under several less important points. The 6-minute video that was embedded in the story did not mention anything about it either.
Next, we tried to look for details about Sheikh Hasina’s schedule on Sunday and found that she had chaired a meeting with the Army top brass on July 21. This was reported by the international media with photos. For example, in its live blog on developments in the country, VoA Bangla published a photo of the said meeting and reported, “প্রধানমন্ত্রী শেখ হাসিনা রবিবার (২১ জুলাই ২০২৪) প্রধানমন্ত্রীর নিরাপত্তা উপদেষ্টা, তিন বাহিনীর প্রধান, মন্ত্রিপরিষদ সচিব ও সশস্ত্রবাহিনী বিভাগের প্রিন্সিপাল স্টাফ অফিসারের সঙ্গে বৈঠক করেছেন। প্রধানমন্ত্রীর কার্যালয় সূত্রে জানা গেছে, তিনি দেশের সামগ্রিক নিরাপত্তা পরিস্থিতির ব্যাপারে তাদের নির্দেশনা দেন।”
[Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Sunday (21 July 2024) held a meeting with the prime minister’s security adviser, the chiefs of the three forces, the cabinet secretary and the principal staff officer of the armed forces. According to sources in the Prime Minister’s office, she gave them instructions regarding the overall security situation of the country.”]
The US-based media outlet’s Bengali arm posted this on its Facebook page as well. The Facebook post contained two photos and it was clearly mentioned that these were from a meeting Sheikh Hasina chaired on Sunday in Dhaka.
Indian digital media outlet The Wall, too, reported that Hasina chaired a meeting at her official residence in Dhaka on Sunday.
On July 21, Alt News reached out to its sources in the Bangladesh deputy high commission in Kolkata, which refuted the report. “India Today itself withdrew the story. And there are reports by the international media which confirm Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s presence in Dhaka. That is enough to show that the report was false,” the source told Alt News on condition of anonymity.
On July 22, The Bangladesh high commission in India officially refuted the report. In a letter to India Today, the high commission said, “…the misinformation on the status of the Government of Bangladesh went viral within a short span of time and triggered huge confusion and anxiety among people at home and abroad. On behalf of the High Commission of Bangladesh, I express my sheer disappointment at the aforesaid erroneous article and post.”
“This kind of misinformation and reporting based on rumour at the time of such critical moment of any country may misguide the people and even add fuel to the crisis and turn the situation into more chaotic. Moreover, such kind of reporting, without gauging the sensitivity, does not only affect the people and the society in large negatively, but also questions the credibility of any news outlet. We request all the news outlets, including the India Today NE, to remain vigil and ensure objective and balanced reporting taking account of the sensitivity of the issue,” it added.
India Today NE published a story on its website on July 22 ‘apologizing’ for the ‘unintentional error’ and attributed it to a “confidential source that could not be immediately verified.”
The story uses only screenshots and not the actual viral video in view of the graphic nature of the clip.
A video is viral on WhatsApp in particular with the claim that a house painter, hailing from the town of Rampur in Uttar Pradesh, has been shot dead by an unknown assailant in Kerala.
This graphic video shows a man, who appears to be painting a wall while standing on a wooden support, shot from a close distance, at least seventeen times in a space of 13 seconds.
Alt News received multiple requests on its WhatsApp helpline to verify the video. Some messages said the incident was from Uttarakhand, some said Noida.
On WhatsApp, the video is accompanied by a recorded voice message (attached below) which says the following:
“This is an incident from Kerala. See if anyone can recognize this painter. Check if he belongs to someone’s family, or is a relative to someone. See what has happened to him. He is from Rampur zilla, identify him if you know him.”
Fact Check
We ran a reverse image search on one of the key frames from the clip and came across an X post from June 29.
DOIDEIRA! Criminoso grava vídeo assassinando um homem conhecido como “Olhão” no bairro Novo Aleixo, em Manaus.
The Portuguese caption, when translated to English, reads: “CRAZY! Criminal records video murdering a man known as “Olhão” in the Novo Aleixo neighborhood, in Manaus.”
Taking a cue from this, we ran a relevant keyword search on Google, and came across this news report, which states that the victim from the viral video, identified as Lucas Pereira, was murdered by unknown gunmen while working on a construction site at a house in the Novo Aleixo neighbourhood in the city of Manaus in Brazil.
We also found a video uploaded by Portal do Holanda, which, according to its YouTube bio, is ‘…the most read news website in Amazonas and the North region of Brazil.’ It reports on the same incident, and features footage of the crime scene.
Another news report states that Pereira had an open arrest warrant issued against him by the court, after being tried for drug trafficking in April 2024. Based on videos circulating on social media, the report also speculated on the victim’s connection to members of criminal factions in Manaus involved in feuds for control of drug trafficking.
To sum up, the viral video of a painter/construction worker shot dead is from Manaus, Brazil. The victim, Lucas Pereira, faced a slew of drug-related charges, and the investigation into his murder was on. The video has no connection to India.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court has stayed an order requiring journalist Rahul Pandita to pay INR7.5 million (US$89,800) in defamation compensation to senior paramilitary officer Harpreet Singh Sidhu, according to newsreports. This stay will remain in effect until the next hearing, scheduled for October 21.
On March 5, an appellate court ordered Pandita, an independent journalist and author, to pay the original ask of INR5 million (US$59,900) plus 6% interest, totaling INR7.5 million, from the date of the suit’s filing. This compensation was for Sidhu’s alleged “loss of reputation and goodwill, mental agony, and hardship due to unfounded derogatory remarks.”
On May 28, the high court stayed the appellate court’s decision after it was revealed that Pandita was not even aware of the trial proceedings against him and had no opportunity to defend himself, according to CPJ’s review of the court ruling.
The order stemmed from a December 13, 2014, report by Pandita, who worked with The Hindu newspaper as an opinion and special stories editor at the time, that has since been withdrawn but was reviewed by CPJ. While it is not clear why the publication withdrew the story, The Hindu initially defended Pandita’s report in a response to Sidhu’s legal notice to the publication as fair comment, according to the Mumbai Press Club.
The report accused Sidhu of negligence in his duties as Inspector general of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) operations in Chhattisgarh. The original defamation suit filed by Sidhu was dismissed by a lower court in Mohali on September 16, 2017, but Sidhu challenged this judgment, leading to the appellate court’s recent decision.
The report claimed that Sidhu did not perform his duties properly during a Maoist attack on December 1, 2013, which resulted in the deaths of 14 people. Pandita alleged that Sidhu took nearly four hours to reach the location despite being only 400 meters (440 yards) away. Sidhu contested these allegations, which were summarized in a statement published by The Hindu, asserting that he was the first to reach the troops and provided proper leadership.
In his defense, Pandita’s lawyers argued that the report was not personal, did not invade Sidhu’s privacy, and was written with due care and caution, according to a news report reviewed by CPJ. They emphasized that the articles were published as part of Pandita’s journalistic duties and were based on eyewitness accounts and responses from CRPF officials.
“The articles were published in relation to the conduct of a public servant, in exercise of public duties, and thus the respondent being a public servant cannot question foul play,” Pandita’s legal team argued. Pandita also maintains that he reached out to Sidhu’s superiors for their right to reply, and that their responses were included in the story.
Pandita declined to respond to CPJ’s request for comment, and Sidhu has not yet replied to CPJ’s text message.
Singapore’s Umami Bioworks has partnered with two Indian entities as it aims to advance R&D and reach commercial-scale production for its cultivated seafood.
Months after its merger with Shiok Meats, Umami Bioworks is looking to advance the scale-up efforts for its cultivated seafood through two collaborations with organisations in India.
The Singapore-based startup has teamed up with the IKP Knowledge Park’s newly established Centre for Smart Protein and Sustainable Material Innovation in Bengaluru, India, which will be aimed at accelerating research and scalability for its cultivated seafood.
Additionally, it is set to collaborate with the Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology in Chennai to set up an R&D facility at the university’s campus.
“India has a wealth of experienced talent in biomanufacturing and steel production. We saw this combination as among the best-in-class globally, and given the relative proximity to Singapore, it was an obvious choice,” Mihir Pershad, founder and CEO of Umami Bioworks, told Green Queen.
IKP partnership to validate and transfer Umami Bioworks’ tech
Courtesy: Umami Bioworks
As part of the incubation collaboration with the IKP’s alternative protein centre, Umami Bioworks’ India-based team will lead the engineering and validation of its plug-and-play manufacturing hardware, supporting the tech transfer from the demonstration line to customer sites.
“IKP provides a hub for our team to work on this scale-up R&D, including meeting and lab space, and a facilitator to help us connect with the supply chain partners that will enable us to deliver a complete production solution,” explained Pershad.
“The partnership is initially scoped for a year, with opportunities to extend and expand over time. Our end goal is to successfully deliver a production-ready manufacturing system, led by our team in India, that is ready for deployment to customer sites around the world,” he added.
“We are excited about the novel technology platform that they bring to our community of entrepreneurs and founders in their pursuit of growth in the smart protein sector,” IKP Knowledge Park chairman and CEO Deepanwita Chattopadhyay said of Umami Bioworks. “This collaboration will not only accelerate Umami’s growth in India, but will also propel the smart protein ecosystem that we are building in the country.”
The Centre for Smart Protein and Sustainable Material Innovation was established in May, born out of an MoU between IKP Knowledge Park and alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) India. The facility aims to support startups with incubation and product development via access to state-of-the-art equipment, and expert mentorship on the technical, IP, regulatory, marketing and business strategy domains.
“This landmark partnership between Umami Bioworks and IKP’s newly launched centre is a prime example of how India’s booming biotech industry and growing smart protein ecosystem are attracting global players,” said Aiyanna Belliappa, senior innovation and entrepreneurship specialist at GFI India.
“We are confident that this collaboration will pave the way for further innovation and investment in India, ultimately contributing to a safe, secure, and just future for food.”
South India leads the country’s cultivated seafood scene
Courtesy: Umami Bioworks
The partnership comes the same week researchers at the Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology developed prototypes of cultivated seafood using milkfish, grouper, red snapper and tilapia cells. The university is also partnering Umami Bioworks, with Sheela Rani, the institute’s director, telling The New Indian Express that the startup will help “set up a full-fledged facility at the campus to develop more cultures and push for commercial-scale production”.
“We are establishing a collaboration with Sathyabama University to expand our pipeline of marine species cell lines in partnership with their newly established National Facility for Coastal and Marine Research,” Pershad told Green Queen.
“We will be doing collaborative research to establish cell lines from new fish, crustaceans, and other species. This work will include seeking [a] deeper understanding of the fundamental biology of these species to enable first-ever cell lines to be established for some species,” he added.
Sathyabama University has earned authentication from the National Bureau of Fish Genetic Resources, meaning its cultivated meat has no recombinant DNA. It will now pursue statutory approvals from the National Biodiversity Authority, the environment ministry, and the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI).
The latter, in fact, has been working to establish a regulatory framework for cultivated meat and seafood companies to file dossiers for approval. In a regulatory conclave held in New Delhi in April, the FSSAI confirmed its willingness to work with the government’s Department of Biotechnology and Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council to set up a framework.
“The FSSAI can institute a working group on cultivated meat. This working group will be able to recommend strategic priorities for cultivated meat (and inputs such as culture media and cell lines) for the FSSAI to consider for regulatory interventions and a strategy for a dynamic regulatory framework,” wrote Astha Gaur, regulatory policy specialist at GFI India. “Ultimately, instituting a scientific panel on novel smart proteins would ensure progressive rule-making and risk management.”
Umami Bioworks’ partnerships symbolise the fast-growing cultivated meat sector in South India. In January, the ICAR-Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (based in Kochi, Kerela) inked a deal with biotech startup Neat Meatt to develop cultivated fish.
Having raised $2.4M to date, Umami Bioworks has previously outlined its plans of submitting regulatory dossiers in several countries this year. Its merger with Shiok Meats will see it bring cultivated unagi (eel) and white fish (grouper) to the market via hybrid applications.
“We are now in active review with the Singapore Food Agency, including regular engagements to review data and address any questions that arise during their review,” revealed Pershad. “We are also making rapid progress in two other geographies and anticipate being able to share an update in the near future.”
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