Jangal hei
Posted by Adam Jadhav | Filed under india
Jangal = jungle
After net gains for several years, India’s forest cover is in decline. The full data is available now from the Forest Survey of India in its newly released State of the Forest Report 2011.
The government writes off any major backsliding, saying the reduction is due to shifting cultivation patterns in the rural northeast, plantation harvesting and Naxal rebels cutting trees. That last one is a dubious.
More likely, there are many factors at play in a complex dynamic that varies state by state. I’m in the process of designing a statistical research project looking for explanation among a number of variables, biological, economic, political and social.
The photo above comes from tropical forest in the Andaman Islands.
Tags: andaman and nicobar, conservation, deforestation, forest, india, jangal, jungle, photography, research, sky through trees, trees
And we’re back…
Posted by Adam Jadhav | Filed under india
I’ve only been back stateside less than a week. I spent my winter break in India and specifically Delhi, visiting friends (and one incredibly important person), laying the ground work for research, meeting scholars and activists, reading development material — Seeing Like a State, The Bottom Billion and Development Redefined — and eating.
This included visits to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the Energy and Resources Institute, Greenpeace India, JNU, WWF India, an organic farm and the Centre for Science and Environment.
It also meant many meals of gunpowder and paratha and curry and thugpa and paranthe and chana and bhel puri and, well, everything. I had the best Indian meals of my life in an out of the way faux village and probably consumed more Tibetan momos in the three weeks there than in my entire life previously. Sadly, almost none of this food was properly photographed. This seems like an incredible oversight now.
Unfortunately, the trip was too short. It always is. But I’ll be back in May.
Tags: cse, delhi, environment, food, greenpeace, india, jnu, nmml, research, shenanigans, wwf
Panchayats the answer to India’s environmental woes? Not yet…
Posted by Adam Jadhav | Filed under united states
I spent much the past semester debating all the various ways society and individuals might protect the environment. What else would you expect from a policy program?
One answer I stumbled upon and investigated is India’s traditional form of local government, made constitutionally secure not quite two decades ago: the panchayat — literally the council of five.
Panchayats represent India’s attempts at decentralization, the supposed transfer of powers from the central and state governments down to village-level actors. For the environment, this theoretically promises that resource, conservation and protection decisions are made at the level where they are actually felt. In reality, panchayats today are hardly robust institutions of local governance. They’re mostly used as implementing agencies for India’s development agenda. Meanwhile they face competition from other less than secure or democratic institutions specifically designed to manage resources.
I’m not promising it’s the most riveting read; and I’m not certain I like the final product. This issue could be a much longer paper involving substantial field work. But click here if you really want to know.
Tags: american university, conservation, decentralization, environment, global environmental politics, government, graduate school, india, local government, natural resource management, panchayat, research, washington d.c.
Hello gecko
Posted by Adam Jadhav | Filed under india
Caught (and released) by researchers from Croatia/Serbia
Presenting a native son of Wandoor, the Andaman Islands Day Gecko. (More on this adventure later.)
Tags: andaman and nicobar, andaman islands day gecko, beach, ecology, environment, india, photography, port blair, research, science, wandoor, wildlife
