Akash Naoghare

Babarao is on the verge of being driven out of his home, a forested patch in this part of Vidarbha(Aamgaon, Wardha). Reason: forest conservation. The elderly man was annoyed by the approach of the forest department or authorities who feel that people are and should not be part of the ecosystem. I had an opportunity over the past few months to interact with the pastoralists – traditional herders or cattle keepers – in and around Vidarbha on the challenges they face in the context of changing climate and demographic changes, vis a vis a modern development paradigm. And each time I heard a new group, I was convinced the situation was more or less the same. All the people with whom I interacted repeated the same story “the forest department and urban people’s quest of Tiger conservation is paving way for so many socio economic problems, same forest department who doesn’t even know the actual scientific meaning of Forest or Jungle.” A Forest or a Jungle is area which is a habitat for d...

Asifa Bano and Dadaji Khobragade. When the heinous act happened to Asifa, whole nation felt it's grief. Everyone wanted to show dissent in one form or another, and it is needed to do so. We can't let such things get repeated every time.  Many people stood for her in different manner, some held protest some angered out through write ups, some made YouTube videos etc. Back in Nagpur the people from our group wanted to organize a protest, so I started talking to various groups and NGOs about their plans and stuff, as we thought it would be much better to have a inclusive protest rather than organizing many small protests throughout the city. To my surprise most of them didn't want to come together, everyone wanted to have it under the banner of their group or NGO. I was like "Are we doing it for the Asifa or just to hog some media coverage?" In another case, many news and entertainment portals wrote articles, did interviews, made some videos about the inhu...